Unbiased Objective Testing At Every Level

No matter what it is or who built it, at PC Blueprints, when it comes to reviews we take it incredibly seriously. We approach each and every review with the same thorough attention to detail that we possibly can. Our goal is a simple one: to provide you guys with our direct, honest opinions of the products we have in the lab. No BS, no nonsense.

Editorial integrity and honest journalism are critical to what we do here. We take our integrity and our consistency incredibly seriously and aim to ensure every review is produced fairly and to a high standard, with multiple use cases and scenarios taken into account.

Our team of hardware journalists and PC enthusiasts have decades of testing and PC-building experience between them.

You can visit our team page right here to find out a little more about who we are and what we do.

Content Guarantee

  • We never take payment for product reviews, under any circumstance, not even via affiliate links.
  • We use quantitative fair testing, where possible, to push each and every component to its limits.
  • We give you direct and honest opinions each and every time.
  • We test each product for a minimum of two weeks in a wide variety of scenarios.
  • We tell you exactly what we want to say, not what a manufacturer wants to see.

Review Scores

With each and every review (not including our "To The Point" pieces), we utilize a scoring system out of 10 (sort of). Good products should be easily identifiable, and the higher the score, the better the product. Each component or part gets rated across a whole host of criteria covering everything from performance to build quality to price to features and more, typically compared against other products in the same category.

1: An affront to humanity
2: Probably won't hurt you, but still isn't worth it.
3: Overpriced, poorly built, and doesn't function out of the box.
4: Still overpriced, but it does technically function as intended.
5: It functions, isn't well priced, and has no bells or whistles worthy of note.
6: Slightly above average, performance/price is ok; it has one positive.
7: Worth considering, price is just about ok, performance is just "alright".
8: Very good, generally solid performance, typically let down by one or two things.
9: Top-tier. Impressive performance, solid build quality, and a reasonable price.
10: Flawless on every level, basically free, annihilates the competition.

Awards

From time to time, and dependent on the quality of a product, we will occasionally issue a review with a hard-earned award. These awards only go to products that, in one way or another, have an outstanding feature or two. Similar to our scoring system above, it needs to meet select criteria to attain its ranking.

Because we're very serious people, we've decided to go with loot quality as our awards of choice. To attain "Rare," the product needs to have at least one major impressive quality that sets it apart from its competition. For Epic, it needs a minimum of two outstanding elements. For Legendary, it needs to be damn near perfect. Maximum Kick-ass, if you will. Delivering exceptional value, phenomenal performance, and revolutionizing its particular field.

It is entirely possible for a product that only scores an 8 to receive a Rare award if that one element is particularly impressive. If it's an average SSD, for instance, with consistent performance, but the price is 30% less than the market average, then it would meet that criteria/threshold.

For Epic, it would need to have market-leading performance at a far lower than expected price point.

For Legendary, it would need to dominate the competition while being cheaper and cooler too. You get the idea.

To The Point

Occasionally we may receive a product under a very tight NDA turnaround or have limited hands-on time at a show or special event. In that case, we may very well write up a "To The Point" review. These are first-look, hands-on, experiential pieces that lack the thoroughness and testing that we'd typically employ, and as such will not be scored, but will give you, the reader, a good understanding of how these products are performing from our own personal subjective opinion.

Once we have the product in hand for review, we will publish an entirely separate article with a score at a later date.