AMD punishing sites for ‘negative coverage’

AMD’s R9 Fury cards are finally here, but with all the positivity surrounding the launch, it’s easy to miss some of the issues with the cards and AMD’s marketing affairs.

News has reached our ears that KitGuru have suffered from issues with the graphics card giant, and it’s a rather dubious play by AMD at that.

Largest among their problems with AMD is their recent withdrawal of a Fury X review sample, prior to the launch this week.

One of the review samples. Image courtesy of KitGuru.

What this means is KitGuru are unable to conduct a hardware review of AMD’s latest graphics card flagship.

We all know that AMD are trying to become competitive in the high-end market once more, with NVIDIA currently unmatched. But with what happened with KitGuru, a bad taste is left in our mouths.

The story follows that KitGuru received an email from AMD on the 11th June relaying that FIJI hardware samples were reserved for KitGuru.

KitGuru eagerly awaited the arrival of the samples, planning their coverage and how they were going to conduct the hardware analysis.

However, during the week of 15th June, KitGuru received a call from Christine Brown, Senior Manager, EMEA Communications at AMD, who informed that their review sample had been withdrawn and that they would not be involved in the launch.

The reason for the withdrawal was stated as being due to “KitGuru’s negative stance towards AMD”.

Above this, Brown further argued that they had limited samples available and would rather focus their efforts on publications with “more positive” coverage of AMD hardware.

Because of this denial by AMD, for FIJI hardware samples, KitGuru have been unable to provide launch day coverage of the R9 Fury cards.

KitGuru’s Allan ‘Zardon’ Campbell says, “If we become unable to share our genuine views and opinions out of fear of a company withdrawing product samples then I see no point in being here at all“. We couldn’t agree more.

Stories like this demonstrate just how desperate AMD is to score a win, and how shaken they are at NVIDIA’s current dominance, something we’ve suspected for a while now.

It’s because of that, that in spite of the leaked benchmarks painting a positive picture for their R9 Fury cards, you can’t help but question AMD.