Every recommendation on this site is checked against the retailer page itself before it earns a place. This page explains exactly what that check is, what disqualifies a product, and where the money comes from — so you can decide how much weight to give anything you read here.
The short version
- Nothing is recommended from memory. Prices, star ratings and review counts are read off the live product page, not recalled.
- Review count is weighted as heavily as the score. A 4.8 from 40 buyers is a weaker signal than a 4.6 from 4,000, and we tell you which one you are looking at.
- Products that fail are named, not quietly dropped. If something was considered and rejected, the guide says so and says why.
- We earn a commission if you buy through our links. It does not change what gets recommended, and it never changes the price you pay.
How a product earns its place
Every pick starts as a candidate, not a recommendation. Before it appears in a guide it has to clear the same set of checks, in this order.
1. The listing has to be real and current. We open the product page and confirm the item is in stock, sold as a single unit rather than a bundle, and not a renewed or used-only listing wearing a new product’s name. A surprising number of otherwise attractive products fail here.
2. The price has to be the live one. Prices on this site are pulled from the product page and refreshed automatically, which is why you will see a price next to a product rather than a vague band. Where a total is quoted — a full parts list, for instance — it carries the date it was calculated, because a sum of live prices goes stale the moment one of them moves.
3. The rating has to be backed by enough buyers to mean something. We publish the star rating and the review count together, every time, in that format: 4.7 (3,239). One number without the other is close to useless. A high score on a handful of reviews gets flagged as thin rather than presented as a verdict.
4. The specifications have to come from the listing, not from the writer. Socket, capacity, panel type, wattage, memory generation — these are copied from the product’s own page. If a figure is not stated there, it does not appear here. We would rather leave a table cell showing something less impressive than fill it with a plausible guess.
5. The parts have to actually work together. On any guide that assembles a complete machine, compatibility is checked rather than assumed: processor socket against motherboard socket, memory generation against the platform, cooler clearance against the case, power supply capacity against the graphics card. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure we need, we say so and pick differently instead of guessing.
What gets a product rejected
These are disqualifying, not negotiable:
- Dead or unavailable listings. If it cannot be bought today, it cannot be recommended today.
- Zero-review products as headline picks. A product nobody has bought yet has no evidence behind it, whatever its specification sheet claims.
- Sub-4.0 star products without explicit disclosure. If one appears, the guide states the score and explains why it still earned a place.
- Bundles standing in for single units. The price stops being comparable the moment a listing includes extras.
- Invented anything. No made-up benchmarks, no estimated prices, no specifications recalled rather than read.
How the guides are structured
Each buying guide leads with a winner grid so you can get an answer in fifteen seconds, then earns the rest of your time: a full section per product with genuine pros and cons, a comparison table, and a FAQ that answers the questions people actually type rather than the ones that are easy to answer.
Explainers work the other way round. They start with the question that comes before the shopping — how much video memory you need, whether a faster memory generation is worth it, what wattage your card really wants — and only then point at products. They are costed against real hardware for the same reason the guides are: an explainer that cannot tell you what the answer costs is only half an answer.
Where the money comes from
Gamers Tech Guide participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you buy through a link on this site we earn a small commission from the retailer.
Two things that follow from that, stated plainly. It costs you nothing — the price is identical whether you use our link or go direct. And it does not decide the rankings. The commission on a $90 power supply and a $600 graphics card are both small enough that steering you toward the expensive one would be a terrible trade against being wrong in public. The full terms are on our affiliate disclosure page.
What we do not do
We do not run paid placements. No manufacturer has ever paid to appear in a guide, and none can.
We do not claim lab testing we have not done. This is an important one. Where a guide compares products on performance, it says whether that comparison comes from published specifications, from manufacturer claims, or from owner reports — and it labels charts as relative and directional rather than presenting them as measured results. If you see a number here, you can trace where it came from.
We do not quietly fix mistakes. When something on this site turns out to be wrong, the correction says what was wrong and for how long.
Who writes this
Authur C. Art, Founder and Lead Reviewer. Every guide on the site carries the same byline because one person is accountable for what it says.
Found something wrong, or a product that should be here and is not? Tell us — corrections are genuinely welcome and they get made.