Quickly learn the latest computer hardware?

August 22, 2005 8:23 PM

Is there a website to quickly get up to speed on the latest computer hardware?

I know computers quite well, but I don't bother to follow hardware except when I need to buy something. Then everytime I need to buy something they've invented new stuff and changed all the terminology for the old stuff. I won't know what socket is what, whether nVidia or ATI is currently on top, they'll have gone and changed the numbering systems from PC3200 to DDR400 and such.

Places like Tom's Hardware often enough seem to assume that I know a Winchester from a Venice from whatever other random word they attached to the CPU, and I just don't care enough to waste the time being constantly up to speed on that.

posted by TheOnlyCoolTim to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Once every 5 or so years I get up to speed on all the computer shite and then go buy something, and then forget about it for the next 5 years. When it's buying time, the Ars Technica Buyers Guide is fabulous for those of us who know about the stuff but just don't care to stay on top of it constantly.

With all that in mind, I recently bought a Shuttle SN95G5 (small form factor and QUIET) with a fast AMD64 CPU, Arco IDE MicroRAID, fanless MSI nVidia video and am now running Ubuntu Linux on it. Now I will go back to forgetting what all that means.
posted by intermod at 8:41 PM on August 22, 2005

For several years now, I've been relying on the sharkyextreme buyers guides for building my systems.
posted by Manjusri at 10:12 PM on August 22, 2005

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who only buffs up on incredibly detailed and fleeting hardware specs when he need to buy a new box.
posted by eurasian at 8:03 AM on August 23, 2005

Ditto the Ars Technica Buyers Guide; there's also an O'Reilly Building the Perfect PC book. There are two articles by the authors on-line, Building the perfect bleeding-edge PC and Building the Perfect Budget PC from last October and February, respectively, so, of course, they're already showing their age.

Silent PC Review is also an excellent reference if building for silence is a concern, and Storage Review is an incredible hard drive reference.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 8:49 AM on August 23, 2005

I'm a big fan of Tom's Hardware. The Tom's Guides section on the left of the main page is broken down by section (e.g. motherboards, processors, graphics cards). I doesn't take long to see what's current and popular, what's up and coming, and they do good comparison reviews.
posted by furtive at 10:23 AM on August 23, 2005

Crap, missed your last paragraph. Sigh.
posted by furtive at 10:23 AM on August 23, 2005

Tom's Hardware is generally believed in the hardware-geek to accept 'gratuities' for their reviews (whether that is true or not, I do not know), I have learned.

I much prefer Anandtech (including its forums), either way.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:10 AM on August 24, 2005