How do you know what guides to trust online? Honesty and transparency. PC Guide is focused on providing the most useful, high-quality articles for you – and this is just as true of our buying guides and reviews. Our buying guides are produced by experts using in-depth research (including user reviews), individual expertise, and factoring in market sentiment. Where we are hands-on and reviewing a product, we explicitly make this known, including full clarity on benchmarks and testing environment.
PC Guide.com is part of the BGFG family
As part of the BGFG family, PCGuide.com benefits from the extensive testing equipment and space used for our other sites, WePC.com and Videogamer.com. PCGuide.com also benefits from the large team of experts within BGFG – and will lean on this expertise should a product require a specialist to review it.
BGFG HQ has a wide range of testing equipment, from dedicated GPU workstations and testing rigs, allowing us to scrutinize every part of a PC, to a huge testing area where TVs, monitors, and more are thoroughly reviewed by our team of experts. Each reviewed product is then given to our in-house photography team, who makes sure to capture every little detail.
Understanding our buying advice
Hands-on product reviews
Each standalone review published on PCGuide focuses on a product that you can pick up from a retailer online or in-store. Where we do hands-on reviews, products are loaned to us from a manufacturer, retailer, or representative. Alternatively, we will purchase that product for testing.
Editorial integrity is key, and we never allow loaned products to come with requirements that affect what we can or cannot say in a review or guide. The PC Guide team will never accept monetary or equivalent incentives to provide a review or coverage – including gifts or promotional items from third parties. (See our full our Editorial policy)
Should we see or cover an early prototype or product that isn’t available from retailers, we will state this in coverage. Additionally, no score or verdict box will be included in that coverage.
Testing and benchmarks
Reviews we publish use real-world or labs-based benchmarking of a fully retail-ready product. Any hands-on reviews will include a combination of real-world and lab testing (eg, synthetic benchmarks) and will be checked by an editor before being published. As well as thorough testing, our experts will also provide informed opinions. These draw on their expertise on the subject, and will often compare the product in question with other relevant offerings. These opinions will never be stated as fact.
Testing is essential to reviews and also informs any hands-on article we offer. Hands-on articles may not be full in-depth reviews. If we have gone hands-on with a product before it is available, or it is not a fully release-ready product, we will state this in the article.
How we test software
In testing software, we always ensure we work with the latest publicly available, stable release. This ensures we test the same software that all users have access to, and that we can provide fair and honest thoughts on an established version of software or an application.
We seek to test the full range of features and applications available to all users, including specific use cases we feel the focus product should be able to meet based on its functions and claimed features. Our software reviews will cover programs and applications in depth, focusing on how usable, useful, and valuable the program is to users who are most likely to use it.
We will not review pre-release, beta, or alternative versions of software – only fully-released and fully available versions of software. If we do see value in covering beta or early software that may offer a preview of a fuller release, we may do this but it will not be a review. We will also make such coverage and our approach explicitly clear throughout the article.
Sponsored content
Should we publish sponsored overviews or hands-on pieces of any product, these will be clearly marked as ‘SPONSORED’. Read more about sponsored posts in our Editorial Policy.
Editorial corrections
Should errors need correcting in articles, we will update and amend those errors as soon as possible. For any article where a review score or verdict is delivered and an update or change impacts it, it will be made clear in the article what changes have occurred and why.
‘Best of’ buying guides
Our ‘best of’ buying guides are compiled to give you a clear view of the best products available. Updates to these guides occur as new products are released and our view on the products changes – necessarily meaning some products are added or removed. These guides are created using in-depth research, and where hands-on review products are included, we make that clear.
Comparison ‘VS’ pieces
Our ‘vs’ articles are designed as a snapshot of consideration for two competing products – or a last-versus-new generation overview. These can be based on hands-on review, and when that happens it will be stated. However, they are designed as an overview for comparing key specs, prices, and sentiment with our view on what to consider as guidance. These do not include tests as in-depth reviews do but are fully researched using public data and factor in user sentiment and views.
How do we choose what to review?
The PC Guide team consists of tech-curious, in-house experts. We select review items based on topical and user interest. This means that we can cover newsworthy or particularly timely items in detail, providing useful insights to anyone considering the item for themselves.
Awards and badging
Products that receive 4 out of 5 stars, or a higher score, in a review are eligible for a PC Guide award. To find out how we award products, read our awards and badging page.
