Hardware Sites

By Cyrris

Those who know me will know that I, like many other gaming enthusiasts, am a bit of a hardware junkie. A substantial portion of my online time is spent looking at news, reviews, and benchmarks on hardware sites, though I only have a few which I routinely visit. I’ll only go out and see more if I’m seriously thinking of buying a particular product, and require as much information about the product as possible. So without further ado, I present a list of what sites I frequent, and why.

Tom’s Hardware Guide is probably the most well known and highly trafficked hardware review site. I myself don’t actually go here as often as the other sites listed on this page, and to be honest it’s quite far from my favourite. Their site’s design appears to be circa 1994, and really it’s quite cluttered - I don’t enjoy browsing it. The site has also seen some problems with ethical issues, and I no longer use them for most of my information. All that said, they have one spectacular redeeming quality in the form of their exhaustive VGA and CPU charts. Their most recent CPU chart in particular answered several questions of mine - such as the FPS difference an upgrade would make if I just switched from PC-133 to DDR266 RAM on my AthlonXP, a question I’d had for years which no-one had been able to comprehensively answer. Of course, it also shows the difference my planned Athlon64 upgrade will make instead.

Hard|OCP, or Hard Overclockers Comparison Page, has long been a regular in my online routine. Their reviews are good, and for video cards come with comparisons that other review sites don’t have. Their de-emphasis on apples-to-apples comparisons is refreshing, and as their name would suggest, they give a good lot of information for those like me who plan on overclocking their products. The site is let down, in my opinion, by being quite sore on the eyes. White on black with other hot colours mixed in really burns when I switch between another tab containing a light site such as Aelon. The only thing I would change about the site is adding an optional alternate styling scheme, with some colours that are easier on my retinae.

The Inquirer is often the place where I will first get wind of upcoming products, and initial figures for specs and benchmark results. Their policy is to not sign NDAs, and while that prevents them from getting the juicy information in most cases, it means what they do get, they can share with us. Their reporting isn’t always spot on, and more than once they’ve had to publicly eat their words, but all in all it’s a great site for the very latest tech news.

Anandtech is quite possibly the closest to perfection that I have seen a hardware site. Their design is clean and attractive, their in depth reviews often feature more benchmarks being run than the other sites, and they also cover things which the other sites just don’t. Their only flaw is perhaps they don’t often review some things which I am interested in - I can’t remember the last time they reviewed a CPU cooler or a power supply.

FiringSquad is not purely a hardware site. It’s a general game enthusiast site and so it covers both hardware and gaming, both in a way which suits my tastes perfectly. It’s hardware reviews are thus not as technical as the other sites, but because they focus on the hardcore gamer, everything they report on is relevant to me in some way or another. It’s sightseeing section is also amusing.

For interests sake, here’s a graph of how heavily trafficked the above sites are in relation to each other. The number on the side is the rank, and it’s a logarithmic graph.

“gamers.com” is FiringSquad, which is owned by GX Media, the Gamers.com dudes.