Yes to both of those. Also, Adrenaline Vault.

Stomped and PlanetQuake

+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!

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.

I wasn't aware Xbitlabs was down. That's too bad 😢

maximus 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. 🙁

VoodooExtreme baby! I would browse that website a lot back in the day (1998-2000).

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.

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.

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.

Not a website but Google Books has a ton of Infoworld magazine issues