  The most frequently used method to collect research data online is
crowdsouring and its use continues to grow rapidly. This report investigates
for the first time whether researchers also have to expect significantly
different hardware performance when deploying to Amazon Mechanical Turk
(MTurk). This is assessed by collecting basic hardware parameters (Operating
System, GPU, and used browser) from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and a
traditional recruitment method (i.e., snowballing). The significant hardware
differences between crowdsourcing participants (MTurk) and snowball recruiting
are reported including relevant descriptive statistics for assessing hardware
performance of 3D web applications. The report suggests that hardware
differences need to be considered to obtain valid results if the designed
experiment application requires graphical intense computations and relies on a
coherent user experience of MTurk and more established recruitment strategies
(i.e. snowballing).
