tdao

Sorry, been really tied up the last three days...

Most manufacturers are outside of the US, with a few maintaining offices here or in Canada.

Most manufacturers have one or 2 PR people that maintain the contact with the different review sites.

The manufacturers don't review their products, very often the products are beta versions that are sent out to the reviewers to test and discover the bugs or ways of getting them to run.

The manufacturing community requires a very delicate hand at times .... (hehe or some KMA attitude). In most cases, there are no problems but if one manufacturer keeps sending you the same useless manual as Chinese pdf file every day for 3 weeks, you can get annoyed, especially if there is vital information that is really needed to get the sucker running.

My own relationship with the manufacturers is that they respect me as professional and this respect is mutual where it is earned.

Major hardware suppliers are nVidia, ATi, Matrox etc for graphics cards, AMD, Intel and VIA for CPUs, Abit - Tyan for mainboards, those are the companies I am dealing with.