Welcome to the New GamersNexus Website v5.0: A Message

Hey everyone,

Although most of what I wanted to say is in the announcement video for this website (ironically), I wanted to write a message welcoming everyone to our new home for written reviews content. This will also provide some additional information. Before we even get started, a note: This is a work in progress! We are still actively working on adding content to and improving bugs on the website. The image comparison tool in particular is one where we’re actively improving the behavior. But this is a strong start, and certainly a far cry from where we were in 2008. And 2022. And basically any time that I was the one responsible for building the website.

Fortunately, this one was built by Wendell from Level1Techs. You should check out his YouTube channel here!

Overview

The Features

Ad-Free

This website is AD-FREE. It will stay ad-free. To help us make that possible, especially as we’ve hired specifically to maintain this site and get old & new content alike imported, and if you find this helpful, please grab a Modmat, Solder Mat, piece of commemorative glassware, or a T-shirt from our store! Or chip-in on Patreon.

Being ad-free also means we are maintaining our video-first approach (as the ads will remain there, and they pay the bills), however, with additional staffing power to bring content to the website. The awesome upside of this video-first approach is that it means we have a TON of assets and stills we can grab to really build image-heavy pages (that load fast) to provide looks at all angles of products, clear installation instructions, and guidance for PC builders.

Function-First

This website is FUNCTION-FIRST. That means our objective is simplicity, both from a maintenance perspective (for a very small team) and from a usability / bloat perspective. We will mostly be focusing on text, images, charts, and tables for web content. 

FAST

This website is FAST AF. Because of Wendell’s engineering work, and because there are no ads, the website loads very fast. The only places we have some slower loading are pages with graphics quality comparisons due to the additional javascript, but the featureset is worth it for those.

Community Service & Searchability

This website is ARCHIVAL. Our goal is to not only get old content ported over to the new layout, but to continue adding our video content in written format. That includes interviews, features like the Artesian piece, and benchmarks alike. We have noticed a sharp decline in viable technical publications in written format, and we are growing concerned about the lack of preservation of technical knowledge in a more permanent, searchable, and discoverable format than just video. We love YouTube and working on it; however, especially for people not as directly engaged with this niche, it is still easier to find things on the web. And less often frustrating, as ctrl+F is so much easier.

Image Comparisons

This website has IMAGE COMPARISONS. As we continue to increase coverage of graphics quality differences and game graphics optimization, we will be making use of side-by-side and split-screen image comparisons. The bottom corner of these comparisons even allows you to choose which screenshot is visible, as we sometimes have more than just 2. Try it out in our Starfield Optimization Guide or our Ray Reconstruction Explainer.

Methodology ‘Storage’

This website contains CONSOLIDATED METHODOLOGY. That starts here. But see below for information.

The Plans

As we continually add content to this site, our main immediate plans are as below:

1. Implement a floating table of contents for easier article navigation. We have bits and pieces of this in place, but we’re working on getting it to follow (in an un-obnoxious way) as you scroll.
2. Improve loading speed and ‘jumpy’ behavior of image comparison pages.
3. Add more test benches to our new Test Bench page, but also port-in the public-facing part of our test methodologies and SOPs.
4. Import factory tours in written format for educational use.

A Personal Message

To use a tired phrase, this has been a “labor of love” from our team. I had been the only one maintaining the website for over a decade, and eventually had to stop updates as it became too cumbersome with the time demands of running the business, benchmarks, and YouTube channel. We had to focus on just one thing, and that was YouTube. It’s the only place we made enough to actually operate. 

Wendell approached me in 2022 and wanted to rebuild the site. That’s because, sometime around maybe 2020, I noted in a video that we wanted to rebuild it (and it never went anywhere), and he really wanted to preserve our benchmark content permanently in the most accessible format possible. I agreed, so we started working on this upfit. I’ve always been slow with executing the ambitions, but we do eventually get there. 3 years later, we finally made it -- thanks, Wendell.

Wendell has been enormously patient with me in this time. My web skillset is prehistoric by today’s standards, and so there was a lot of learning. We both wanted this to be a consumer-first effort to make it easier to learn about PC hardware, how the factories work (those conversions are coming!), and component performance. We offer that in video, but it’s not going to reach people just getting into the industry.

It’ll be good for business. But it’s also just something we both wanted to do.

But half of this website is sentimental. As I said in the video above, I have felt bad for abandoning the website updates since the ~2018-2020 era when we slowed publication. Selfishly, that’s not because we got emails nearly weekly with people asking us to publish our content written again, but because the website was the last facet of the business that my dad, before his unexpected passing in 2015, had been personally familiar with. He saw the videos, but the website was where I spent all my time (and the reason I dropped out of school). He was the one who signed me up for a Microsoft Front Page class when I was about 12, so I have him to thank for the early HTML experience. And I suppose I also have him to thank for getting me started on what was probably the world’s worst web-building tool, but maybe he wanted to “build character.”

I grew up building GamersNexus and he got to watch the process and was unbelievably supportive. I’d publish a (probably very poorly done, by today’s standards) review of something like a Tuniq cooler I’d saved for, and he’d read it and talk to me about it. He was probably one of two people who’d read those. He actually made the original version of this logo in 2008, too. He made it in Microsoft Word. He told me that (whatever version it was) saved vector files -- I never fact-checked that, but it appeared to have been true. The logo has been maintained and updated, but uses his original G/N design. I take accountability for the awful font choice (and I also added the Photoshop CS3 blend modes to the logo).

Without getting much further into it than that, the point is that at least half of this effort is because I wanted to preserve this aspect of the business as a means of preserving those memories. Although the videos had started earlier, the big push didn’t happen until 2015 -- and the reason is because it was no longer optional to have the business work. It had to work, and it had to suddenly become a means of supporting the family. Video was the way forward.

I don’t want to linger on the topic because you’re all here for technology, but I did want to share it in a rare personal message just to give some visibility into what drives this site. And last time I shared anything close to this, we had a lot of you email me to say thanks as you’d connected with the loss and the perseverance. So to those of you who needed it: Look ahead and push on, but there’s no shame with finding ways to remain connected with those memories to continue the life and memory of those before us.

But we never intended to leave the website behind, and now we’re back. I’m excited about that. The website works better than it ever did. It’s also nice to have a place to write some thoughts and updates directly and more personally for once, as I often keep that out of videos to focus on the product.

This site loads fast and it has a highly qualified team maintaining it. Patrick, Jeremy, and Jimmy did the bulk of the work pre-loading the content into the site for launch. A big thanks to the team for pushing on that, and to Wendell and Krista of Level1Techs for, as Wendell calls it, “computer janitorial” work.

Publishing Plans

We’re adding more content nearly daily. We will be balancing a mix of pulling old, still-relevant content forward first, alongside importing new content. The current plan is to publish written versions of our videos on a one-week delay, sometimes it might be faster.

The conversion process for scripts is mostly straight-forward; however, some things work better spoken than written. For those sections, we are trying to keep a sharp eye to strip things like directional words (here, this, that, these) that don’t make sense without some pointing, and also trying to clean-up the colloquialisms that don’t transfer well to writing. That means you’ll find some word choice differences, but for the most part, they’re a fairly close 1:1 representation.

We also regularly cut content from videos for time. Our Cities Skylines 2 piece had a whole section written about advanced graphics, but we cut it as we were running too long already (the video target length is ~30 minutes). This is an algorithmic decision, not a content decision. Because we don’t have to fight an algorithm here, we hope to bring this cutting floor content to the written version of the reviews and tests.

Thanks for the support, everyone. Go explore the site. Oh, and all the old content is still here - it just doesn’t look as good. You can find it with a Google search if you need something specific.

Try these pages that we spent some extra time on:

• Inside the Collapse of Artesian Builds (featured story - uses ‘fancy’ page elements)
• Dan Case A4-H2O Review
• Intel Arc A580 Review
• Cities Skylines 2 Benchmarks & Graphics Optimization (uses the image comparison tool - but we’re still working on page loading for this)

Oh, and some fun history. Here’s what the old website looked like:

2008 (Launch)

~2011 Era

~2014 Era

~2015 Era

2016-2023

I’d say it’s a good thing that Wendell and Krista stepped-in for this one.

- Steve