So it strikes me, there are a lot of people who manage to do bad jobs of suggesting components, from "reviewers" to forumgoers, and everywhere in between. The reasons are usually obvious if you already know the product is bad or inappropriate for you, or if you can read between the lines well, but what if you can't? You might end up wasting money, without even knowing it.
So what are the reasons for bad suggestions? I generally list ignorance, fanboyism, fantasy building, malice, and feeling honor bound to suggest certain components. Ignorance is fairly obvious. Sometimes people just don't know what they're talking about, whether it's outdated information, or something anecdotal they took on faith. Not much needs to be said about this, beyond two major factors: be willing to admit you were wrong, and try not to be ignorant.
Fanboyism, however, due to its close similarity to brand loyalty, deserves some discussion and definition. What is fanboyism? Fanboyism is when brand loyalty gets taken to an extreme, beyond reason, causing prejudice and inaccurate suggestions and belief in the face of evidence. Brand loyalty, however, is preferential treatment for a brand based on personal reasons, and usually doesn't come out in suggestions as a strong biased arguing point. Example being: I've got brand loyalty to EVGA. Awesome customer support, excellent warranty, and most of their products are well thought out, and designed in a way that's beneficial to my use. I'm not going to suggest them to someone that doesn't need those things, though, and, since their new motherboard team isn't quite up to my standard for EVGA, I wouldn't suggest their motherboards right now.
Fantasy building is what I call it when people try to get someone else to build the PC they wish they could build. This will come out in suggestions of multi-GPU, flagship motherboards, and top-end CPUs for people who would be perfectly happy with less, and not even use it in a way to see a difference. This is bad, because you waste people's money doing it, and that's kind of a dick move. This almost pisses me off more than ignorance, just because ignorance will generally get worse performance for a price point, but fantasy builds will convince someone to drastically overspend.
Malice. How can you give someone malicious advice on building a PC? Basically, by doing the opposite of fantasy building. You don't want that guy to have better than you, you don't want to suggest the stuff you wish you had, so you suggest worse. Congratulations, if you do this, you're in the running for asshat of the year. Die in a fire. Don't screw someone else over out of jealousy.
Finally, there's the honor bound people. This most frequently will apply to reviewers, bloggers, and fans of certain things being supported by a brand. A good example. Some of the bigger sponsors for competitive SC2 are AMD, Kingston HyperX, and ibuypower. But over at teamliquid.net, the best community site for competitive Starcraft, on the Tech Boards, we refuse to suggest stuff made by these and other big sponsors if they're bad, not cost efficient, or any other reason. Reviewers and bloggers will frequently rave about the quality of a product, and look for ways to make it look good, in hopes of getting more stuff to review.
Guess what. PC components are almost always objective. Preference on certain factors will be subjective, but performance, quality, warranty, and support are just plain facts. Misrepresenting them for any reason, particularly to kiss ass, is just stupid. If you misrepresent them too badly, you'll leave people with a sour taste. If you show the actual quality, and then leave the value of the support of x organization up to the prospective buyer, everybody ends up happy.
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