I miss sharky extreme. Best forums in the 90s. What ever happened to them…
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-happened-to-sharky-extreme.297956/
Glad they are keeping the forums alive, though! That’s something.
Wow I completely forgot that name!
Techreport, Hardocp, Anandtech. All killed by YouTube which is an objectively worse format for technical information.
overclock.net lives on
And xtremesystems.org :(
End of an era.
Thank you for providing a lot of high quality content for so many years!
Any reason as to why they closing down???
Ian Cutress shared on his YouTube channel that the owners saw it as redundant to Toms Hardware even though Anandtech was far more focused on architecture. He went into some detail about how Anandtech was pushed to become more generalist and consumer oriented, so basically it was redundancy that they themselves created
It’s implied that it was a decision by management. If I had to guess, it’s related to money and/or the redundancy cause by the same parent company owning both Tom’s Hardware and Anandtech.
Kind of unfortunate, since I always thought Anandtech had the better articles, but I guess this also preserves Anandtech’s legacy in some ways.
Finally, for everyone who still needs their technical writing fix, our formidable opposition of the last 27 years and fellow Future brand, Tom’s Hardware
So the actual reason is the parent company doesn’t wasn’t to run both.
But Tom’s Hardware is awful.
Any article I’ve seen from them has either been so low detail it feels like someone used ChatGPT 0.1 to write it, or it’s so blatantly just and advertisement for whatever sponsor they’re talking about.
Of course, that means AnandTech probably was still decent and since it was decent it cost money to run, so fuck it, let’s just see how much we can get nvidia to pay us to post fluff pieces instead.
Yeah it’s a shame because there was a time that Toms hardware was so good and often neck and neck with Anandtech in terms of great articles to read, but at some point it became more sensationalist and the line betweens tom’s guide and tom’s hardware blurred (with tom’s guide seeming to take over). There are still nuggets that are okay, but just not like it used to be.
Tom’s Hardware wrote plenty of junk back in the day. I remember articles where Tom’s Hardware would say “AMD trashes Intel in this benchmark”, but the difference was barely measurable. It was like they had a form fill for what to say after showing a graph. If one side was ahead by any margin at all, it trashed the competition.
Anandtech was more sobering, but their website was a mess. Go to any section of the site (storage, gpus, whatever) and product announcements are sorted together with reviews. There are about ten product announcements for every review. When trying to get a comparison of different products for a build, it was hard to track down a useful article.
Neither site had much changed their layout in 20 years, but Tom’s Hardware at least makes it easier to find what you want.
Yeah this is definitely a brand merger in some ways.
I imagine it might be due to profitability, too. I think the rate of articles has slowed down in the last 5 years, and I think losing Ian Cutress’s analysis was also tough for their articles.
It feels like a lot of the hardware journalism these days has moved to YouTube, like Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed, TechTechPotato, Moore’s Law Is Dead, etc.
I think Chips and Cheese seems to be the biggest site for detailed hardware analysis these days.
Let’s not forget about HotHardware. They’re still carrying the torch of detailed hardware analysis as well my beloved NotebookCheck.
And while the AnandTech staff is riding off into the sunset, I am happy to report that the site itself won’t be going anywhere for a while. Our publisher, Future PLC, will be keeping the AnandTech website and its many articles live indefinitely. So that all of the content we’ve created over the years remains accessible and citable.
This is such a big thing. Losing access to content is something we’re seeing en masse and future historians and hobbyists greatly appreciate having historical articles accessible and not lost to the sands of time. I think it would be even better if we could all torrent and archive as well, but accessibility and continued access is appreciated.
Yes but how long until their publisher corporate execs crunch the numbers for the cost of operating the servers and decide it isn’t worth it to keep it going?
It sounds like a large crawl should be initiated at archive.ph and archive.org (Wayback Machine) to keep this info available to the public.
Exactly. This is why the internet archive should be a universally publicly-funded endeavor. It’s just as important as the world’s libraries.
I’m really hoping the internet archive shifts to some distributed P2P type model (IPFS, Tahoe-Lafs etc) where anyone can assign a hard drive as tribute, archive any public webpage on it and it’ll be replicated around the world, but still accessible through a single protocol. You can’t stop the signal!
universally publicly-funded endeavor
History has always been in the hands of the victors. We’ve finally created a significant exception. But, status quo society doesn’t want the responsibility of reasoning out their own decisions or understanding those of others. They’ll believe it best to hand their power back to their oppressors. Even if they believe their oppressors “good”, they’re choosing to enslave greatness to democratic mediocrity. Anything but personal sacrifice.
