Two that I visit pretty regularly are Sharky Extreme (mainly for reviews and benchmarks) and Reactor Critical (mainly for old drivers and utilities). Many thanks to the Internet Archive for keeping these old sites available.
What are your favorite defunct tech websites, and why?
Yes to both of those. Also, Adrenaline Vault.
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks
Stomped and PlanetQuake
Win 11 - Intel i7-1360p - 32 GB - Intel Iris Xe - Sound BlasterX G5
+1 for Sharky over here.
Also liked FiringSquad and xbitlabs.
EDIT: This is the post from sharkyextreme that got me into computing tinkering. Man, I'm feeling that nostalgia!
Outrigger: an ongoing adventure with the OR840
QuForce FX 5800: turn your Quadro into a GeForce
Xbitlabs 🙁
Xbitlabs for sure; they did maybe the most in-depth HDD reviews along with "Old" StorageReview.
StorageReview still exists but I can't stand their newer articles' writing style, and their Reliability Database has vanished. 😕
Dan's Data did some fun articles.
There were a bunch of news/forum sites of varying quality that went up following the "netbook boom" of 2008. 99% of these are long gone. It was a fun time, IMO.
nVnews, 3DFiles, Firingsquad, Xbitlabs, Voodoo Extreme...
I don't care to think about how many thousands of hours of my life I spent on those sites over the years.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
I wasn't aware Xbitlabs was down. That's too bad 😢
wrote:I wasn't aware Xbitlabs was down. That's too bad 😢
Yeah, I didn't know until I saw this thread and clicked the link in my bookmarks... totally gone. 🙁
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
VoodooExtreme baby! I would browse that website a lot back in the day (1998-2000).
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HbC_nq8t1S9l7qGYL0mTA
Collection: http://www.digiloguemuseum.com/index.html
Emulator: https://sites.google.com/site/capex86/
Raytracer: https://sites.google.com/site/opaqueraytracer/
Not sure if this is *exactly* the same...but in Australia there was a magazine called atomic that had an associated website called atomicmpc. It is now a sub-site of pcauthority https://www.pcauthority.com.au/atomic, not sure if that makes the original defunct. But the forums are still there http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/.
In ancient times, aceshardware.com used to be awesome.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
The Red Hill Guide is still up but they stopped updating it (they got bored with the new stuff around the same time I did, haha.) That used to be my reference text back when I was broke as hell and deliberately kept myself a few years behind the curve.
I was browsing it a while ago and found a comment I'd sent in at least a decade earlier, identifying one of their mystery boards (the infamous PC Chips M919. 😜 ) Totally forgot I'd done that.
What's funny is that site kind of shaped how I interacted with computer dealers for a long time, I still ask about things like return rates or what the shop machines are running if I'm in a brick-and-mortar place looking at something. Usually I get feigned ignorance or sometimes angry glowers & indignation. One time I was even asked to leave a shop after daring to ask how many failures had been returned of a specific part. Red Hill just wrote that stuff up right there for everyone to see.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!
TechTV 😜
I consider it more "dead" vs "defunct" but comp.sys.ibm.pc.xxxxxx (i.e. comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) saw a great many hours of my life.
Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?
Not a website but Google Books has a ton of Infoworld magazine issues
HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
