AnandTech

» see anandtech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

anandtech was the link you opened when you wanted to know if a new cpu was actually faster or just had a higher clock number. for me that started around 2003. i was specifying parts for my own builds and the donanimhaber forum was where you went to talk about it, but anandtech was where the actual numbers came from. the same was true for the next twenty years. you compared price-performance and looked at the cache-latency table. the benchmark graph turned up in your forum signature.

it was founded in april 1997 by anand lal shimpi when he was fourteen years old. the original site name was anand's hardware tech page, hosted on a free geocities account, and the first reviews were of socket 7 motherboards. by 2000 it had grown into a full review site with multiple writers and a forum. by the mid-2000s it was the canonical destination for any serious cpu or gpu review on the english-speaking internet. the depth was the differentiator. every other site would publish a number, and anandtech would publish the methodology that produced the number, with a paragraph explaining what cache behavior under load actually looked like.

shimpi sold the site to purch in december 2014 and left the editor's chair shortly after. purch was acquired by future plc in 2018, and the publication kept running through that transition under ryan smith as editor-in-chief. on august 30 2024 ryan posted the farewell. the publishing stopped that day. about a year later the archive itself went offline, and the only piece of the site that stayed live was the forum, which still had over 350,000 registered users and a 35-million-post backlog of two decades of hardware threads.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

the methodology was the product. tom's hardware would publish a frame rate. anandtech would publish a frame rate plus the 99th-percentile frame time, with a paragraph about why that mattered for the experience of actually playing a game. the spec-sheet detail in a typical anandtech review of a new cpu architecture would be deeper than the official product page from intel or amd. the readership trained itself on that level of detail and then expected it everywhere else.

~ the day it died ~

the farewell post was titled "end of the road: an anandtech farewell." ryan wrote it. it was direct about the economics. enthusiast hardware publications had not been viable as standalone businesses for years, and future plc had been keeping the brand alive longer than the numbers justified. the decision to stop publishing was a business one made by the parent. the staff had known for weeks. the readership found out the day the post went up.

~ what carried over ~

the benchmark-graph template that every hardware review on the internet now uses. anandtech did not invent the bar chart, but it defined the conventions: which axes go where, which colors mean what, how to label a multi-run synthetic test, how to present a cpu's performance against the previous generation. tom's hardware inherited the role of canonical hardware review site after the shutdown. the level of methodology depth that anandtech was known for has not been reproduced at anything close to the same scale.

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