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PCIe Scaling analysis. It's three years old, though.

That's not the end-all, be-all for all comparisons, but it gives you a good idea how the different brands and generations compare to each other in general. Before Nvidia released the GTX400 series months later, ATI had the two fastest video cards available (the HD5870 and the dual-GPU HD5970 which is still the fastest single card).

Nvidia seems to throw more money at developers with their The Way It's Meant To Be Played program, but I honestly haven't noticed any specific problems after upgrading to my HD5870 a few months ago (after having only Nvidia since buying my GeForce 2 GTS the week they were released). A lot of people seem to be coming to the conclusion that both camps' drivers suck but in different ways. I honestly think that most people running single cards in common configs with popular games will never notice a difference in gameplay either way.

You do get some bonuses like PhysX with Nvidia, but there are open options in the works, and the Radeons are more efficient. The 5870 uses about 15% less power than my old GTX285, and in the GPGPU apps I run (dnetc), it's actually about 6x as fast (and still over twice as fast as an overclocked GTX480, which is a little faster in most games). The efficiency difference probably won't be noticed on your power bill, but it does mean a cooler card, which in turn means less fan noise and less heat in your case/room.

Soundly beating the 5830 is a stretch at best. On Tom's Hardware's Benchmark Results, the 460 is outperformed by the 5830 in every benchmark, Crysis, and AvP test. It loses sparingly in the rest of the games, but calling it the clear better of the 2 is just isn't realistic.

I agree that you can definitely build it cheaper. I took the road of "future proofing" (if such a thing is possible in this industry) for a slightly higher dollar amount for a much greater ROI.

- The 965BE already includes a fan+heatsink. As you say, you can easily get an upgraded cooler and o/c the CPU for even a greater bang/buck. You could even save a few bucks and go with a 955BE ($160) or even a 940BE ($120).

- The 5770 GPU won't need to be upgraded for a few years. Spending a little more money upfront on a beefier PSU and MOBO now (+$30), means that when you upgrade your video card, you can simply get another 5770 at a reduced price and get almost double your framerate. :-)

Having been burnt on both ends, I believe there is a sweet spot between cheap and expensive. It lets you maximize your performance without burning money constantly playing the "upgrade" game.

You wouldn't to know of a "Best CPU for the money", kind of like how Tom's Hardware (yes, I know), has one for GPUs by chance?

e.g. 10 pages of fluff sumarized...

Best Graphic Cards for the money: June 2010
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/graphics-card-geforce-radeon,2646.html
(Categorys $90, $100-$190, $200-$275, $280-$400, over $400
$999 Radeon HD 5870
$310 Radeon HD 5770x2 ($170) idle 151W load 390W ** -- HD 4870x2 idle 204W
$400 Radeon HD 5850
$250 Radeon HD 5750x2 ($104-$140)
$220 Radeon HD 5830
$155 Radeon HD 5770 idle 35W load 256W ** -- or HD 4870 .. load 338
$125 Radeon HD 5750
$100 Radeon HD 4850, GeForce GTS 250
$80 GeForce 9600GT
$70 Radeon HD 5570
$40 Radeon HD 4650

Cheers

Chrome's rendering engine is slow and sucks. Javascript is much faster, but that's it.

huh?. Chrome seems vastly faster in all the least-synthetic benchmarks.

Websites like http://www.tomshardware.com/ are interesting, but they are more interested in computers like PCs etc..

I think there is another way to look at this question of "figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way"

From the moment I saw this, i.e. "hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware" ... that sounds more like open hardware/software projects like Arduino. e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
http://www.arduino.cc/

Also "banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way" ... thats just like these smaller embedded CPU open hardware/software projects. These small embedded CPU projects are progressing just like the early 1980s computer era and once again the growth is driven by hobbyists. They are creating more advanced projects all the time. For example here's a 2D and 3D software rendering engine running on a small cheap embedded ARM processor where its even generating the video signal in software.
http://hackaday.com/2010/06/13/gaming-system-for-less-than-three-bucks/

Then moving up in scale even bigger, hobbyists have even created a remarkable games console called Pandora. Incredibly this is more powerful than any *mobile* console by Nintendo or Sony! (apparently its taken the hobbyists two years to design their Pandora hand held console. I think its very inspring work, but then its what hobbyists were doing in the early 1980s computer era when they were building their own high spec computers, to then sell to other hobbyists who were more interested in doing interesting things with the software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)

The hobbyists driven growth in open hardware/software projects I think is very much like the early 1980s computer era with the same kinds of interests for hobbyists.

You need to look into websites, there is no magazine that captures the zeitgeist of the personal computer industry today:

http://www.arstechnica.com/
http://www.lifehacker.com/
http://www.tomshardware.com/

then there are specialty sites that focus on very particular topics, but those are some good, general sites to start with...

To get your John C. Dvorak fill, you could go here:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/

And Jerry Pournelle is here:

http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/

Hope that helps

Yeah...no. Mac is a trainwreck. And 5% of the market is nothing. Why would anyone spend time investing in something where they get 1/20th the return? There really is no debate, I don't know why I'm bothering. MacOS is not virus-free because it's secure, it's virus free because it has tiny market share.

While I think it's atrocious that Windows has to have a third-party layer akin to the FDA to keep users from getting waylaid by malicious code, I'm a little surprised that you think Avast is better than NOD32 or Kaspersky. The most recent AV-Comparatives report is rather unflattering to Avast. I'm personally a NOD32 (ESET) fan.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_report26.pdf

Any operating system needs some sort of code checking layer if it wants to stop users from installing malware. This is nothing special for Windows, and the security model in Win7 is just as good as OSX and other OSs (actually, as the winner of the Pwn2Own competition and other security experts point out, its in many respects better, se below).

The self-spreading silent virues of many years ago are no longer the major threat on Windows either. A huge for-profit malware industry using social engineering and targeting the biggest market is.

Hacker: Windows More Secure Than Mac OS X:

It is of the opinion of Charlie Miller, a well known Mac security guru, that even Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X, isn't as safe as Windows.

Winner mocks OS X hacking contest:

Why Safari? Why didn’t you go after IE or Safari?

It’s really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don’t do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don’t have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you’d find in Windows.

It’s more about the operating system than the (target) program. Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too. The underlying OS doesn’t have anti-exploit stuff built into it.

2.1GHz huh? That's not a 1998 processor. The fastest Intel processor available in 1998 -- late 1998 -- was a 450MHz Pentium II Xeon. Neither Vista nor Win7 will install on anything even close to that.

It wasn't until 2001 that Intel crossed the 2GHz line, and 2002 when there was a 2.1GHz processor in their lineup. That, I think, sets the tone for analyzing the rest of your system specs.

That 1998-era 50GB drive? Umm, no. Drives in 1998 time were generally in the single-digit gig range (much too small to even install Win7). Here is the announcement of a series of new machines from Dell that year:

http://news.cnet.com/Compaq%2C-Dell-ship-new-computers/2100-1001_3-212040.html

We'll get back to that announcement in a minute.

IBM released a 10G drive in July 1998:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/15-years-of-hard-drive-history,1368-2.html

So that pretty much sets the upper limit of what would have been available. 50G drives were around in 2002-3, which is probably not coincidentally the same time frame as your 2.1GHz processor.

Now, the G1 mentioned in the article above was a pretty good Dell system in 1998, the kind of thing you bought to run NT4. Its maximum RAM? 256M, one quarter of what you say you installed.

I'm too lazy to go figure out at what point it was possible to buy a Dell desktop system that was expandable to 1G, but I am willing to bet it's somewhere around 2002, just like all of the other specs of your system.

So I would have to conclude that you actually installed Win7 on a 2002 or 2003 era machine, and it will run very poorly with only 1G RAM; my personal experiments showed that the systems' responsiveness was downright awful below 2G (32-bit).

Cheers!

where do you make this shit up? ever looked at the steam on windows vs linux article, or was that sarcasm?

How about this or this .

So yeah, I'd like an actual response as opposed to your imagination.

There you go.

(coming soon)

If you have a good UPS as you say, you should be experiencing very consistent power output regardless of what is happening on the line in. I notice you don't mention your PSU, which is a very important half of the equation for turning 'dirty' power to 'clean' for the components. Even supposedly high-end PSUs can be introducing voltage differences that ultimately wear down the components they power.

Further, ambient temperature shouldn't be any issue to the CPU if your HSF is good enough. I don't let my CPU get much more than 20-30 degrees (F) over ambient (and yes, it takes an expensive HSF to do this, my current is a Titan Amanda (rebranded MacsTek MA-7130-A)), and anything under 120-130 (F) should be able to last for years.

Quality is a watchword that should be applied not just to some components, but every component. If your UPS isn't doing its job and providing dirty power and not holding output steady in browns and failures, dump that zero and get yourself a hero or you have only yourself to blame. If the PSU can't perform to spec, dump that too. Every component requires research for every product generation. Sometimes otherwise good manufacturers don't hit the window, like Thermalright who I regularly prefer for heatsinks had some fairly weak offerings between the SLK-900U and the TRUE Copper/IFX-14, which is why I went with the MA-7130-A. (Though if I were buying an HSF right now, I'd probably go with the Noctua NH-D14.)

I respect your experience, really, I wish I had the opportunity to build in the 80s, but it doesn't change the fact that you must be diligent. Research every component, every generation, every time, and get the best or be sorry.

uhm why take the most expensive intel? ... just choose the processor 1 notch above the amd (which is cheaper then the six core) http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/Performance-Index,1407.html enjoy your fanboism ;) pwnt

Flash is great for charts and graphs.

I must admit, it annoys me when I have to reload pages to view benchmarks. And of course, the site is usually overloaded, so flipping to a new chart takes 12 seconds. That's marginally worse than 56k used to be.

A prime example is Tom's Hardware. I just went here and loaded the page in a speedy 48.5 seconds.

The slashdot homepage only takes 2.3 seconds... every pageload on sites like Tom's is horrible.

"When it comes to security, even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else. And it's not just the hackers; third party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."

Hackers said that Microsoft is better at making their products more secure than anybody else? What about Charlie Miller the Pwn2Own winner who said pretty much the exact opposite? I guess he doesn't count.

Page 11 was particularly interesting: 3D game graphics are 33% slower in Lucid due to Compiz.

Quite frankly, PS3 on the Linux was useless

(Assuming you meant Linux on the PS3)

Many, including the US Air Force would beg to differ.

From the benchmarking, you're right. It's a faster HDD than other HDD's, but nowhere near the performance of an SSD. Labeling it as an SSD/HDD hybrid is misleading and wrong.

There is a difference between your opininion of privacy and the laws surrounding it.

If so then cite some of those laws.

It's regulated in law, not (your claim of what) common sense (ought to be).

Is it? I mean specifically the wifi aspect of it pertaining to broadcasting unencrypted information?

I don't *know* if Google violated the law, I'm just saying many arguments brought forward here as to why they didn't are simply not valid.

Of course, and I most certainly agree there. There will be a long judicial process to determine whether they have violated the law, but also I thought recently it was - in Germany too funnily enough - written into law that it is the obligation of the network owner to secure his/her wifi network. Naturally 2 wrongs don't make a right but claiming for privacy breach on those grounds would be admitting your own breach of the law.

German Court Says Secure Your Wi-Fi or Get Fined

"Private users are obligated to check whether their wireless connection is adequately secured to the danger of unauthorized third parties abusing it to commit copyright violation," the court said, according to the AP.

The courts, however, will not be holding users responsible for what happens over their wireless network. So, it seems that making a password mandatory is the sensible measure of legal responsibility to put on internet subscribers.

More MIPS per watt on the phenom

Nope.

Both the i5-750 and i7-920 use considerably less power at load and both benchmark as good as (or better than) the 1090T.

True, but all the benchmarks show that the i7-920 (and the i7-930 and i7-860) end up doing better on multi-threaded tasks than the 6-core Phenoms. So, it works out that 8 threads really is better than 6 cores in most cases.

As a matter of fact, the 4-core i5-750 (2.66GHz) can beat the 6-core 1090T (3.2GHz) in some benchmarks, and isn't very far behind in the rest. If you overclock the i5-750 to 3.2GHz (which is easy to do even with the stock cooler), it far surpasses the best that AMD offers.

On the other hand, the 890FX chipset is better than anything Intel has out...42 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 is pretty awesome.

I will start this by saying that I have built four AMD desktop computers over the years and currently use three AMD systems (a single and quad core desktop and one dual core laptop). The quad core desktop was built as a server (video processing/storage/backup).

But, it is now time to upgrade my primary single core desktop computer (gaming and general use). I would prefer it if I could get an AMD system, however after doing the research, I am currently planning on building an Intel Core i7-930 based system. I completely agree that I could get an AMD system at a better price, but the performance would be worse than the Intel system. The point of this system is good performance at a decent price.

I had already planned to get the Intel based system before reading this review, but the Phenom II X6 review by Tom’s Hardware just reinforced my original decision. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-14.html

This might make things a little clearer for the Intel case. Certainly it gives more detail about how it works (for one thing it's not just a "base speed or Turbo speed" thing, there are multiple boost steps depending on the exact situation).

It was stolen, since Alan Kay will always be a researcher who would rather have his innovations used. Alan Kay used to work for Apple and told Steve his he should increase the size of the iTouch and could rule the world. The Apple Newton could be consider a Dynabook v1, with the iTouch being v2 and the iPad being version 3 of Alan's dream computer. Also after Alan left Xerox Parc, he went to work for Apple in 1994, he is currently heading the institute he founded.
Here is Alan's view on the iPad... http://www.tomshardware.com/news/alan-kay-steve-jobs-ipad-iphone,10209.html

The article ends with "Interestingly, though, only one company has the technology and IP needed to integrate a highly parallel GPU into a CPU... and that’s AMD." Although I like AMD and would surely like to see them getting a revolutionary "fusion" product out before anyone else, one has to ask whether the authors have looked under the hood of Intel's Clarkdale and Arrandale core i5... This shows Intel's rapidly catching up, and a neck-to-neck race may arise between their Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer. Not to mention the stubborn rumors that Nvidia's itself is developing x86 technology...

Here's some background for those of us that have been living in a cave:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/15/amds-next-gen-bulldozer-is-a-128-bit-crunching-monster.aspx
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/future-3d-graphics,2560-9.html

I hoped to find some new information about database frontends, but the first paragraph makes it absolutely clear there won't be any, and makes you wonder why the reviewer even bothered with filling the rest of the page:

First off, I am not a database user. [...] MS Access isn't the industry-dominating title that Excel is. So, we won't be looking for Access replacements here.

So what will he be lookiing for ? An Excel replacement ? Well, that is suposed to be covered on another page.

we're comparing these apps to Access, something similarly clean, user-friendly, and scalable.

So he's not looking for an Access replacement, but will compare to Access??

Anyway, the result is still that there is no Access equivalent on Linux, and that is the main problem I have since i switched to Ubuntu some 7 months ago.

There are several great databases for big and small uses (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQlite, etc.), but there is no decent frontend to design forms and build applications which require a database. I have successfully used Access->ODBC->PostgreSQL on several projects, and I'm about to install Access in a VM for my own use because Base and Kexi are just much too limited (and Kexi kept crashing when I tried to make a query with a simple join).

And such stupid reviews will certainly not motivate coders to build a great database front-end for Linux.

Given Sony's forays into drm, I think eliminating yet another means of copying is the real reason.

MSFT itlsef has already been hit by a similar attack.

Is that really the case, though? The article was a little light on details with this acceleration, for all I know it could be DirectCompute based which would not work on Intel graphics and might end up being slower than IE8 on such systems.

Definitely, it's not just performance either, they've added support for several things in HTML5, CSS3, SVG etc that people have been wanting. They've really shown a lot of effort in trying to make IE not suck so much.

I wasn't aware the Javascript had improved that much in IE9. Thanks for the info.

Yeah, in a multi-core system they're actually using one core to compile Javascript in the background before it gets executed (so it's executing compiled code). The article I was reading was light on technical details, but it seemed to imply that it was being compiled to ASM or some other CPU-dependent language. Maybe just similar to how the .NET CLR works though.

It looks like there's a short summary here:

http://www.taranfx.com/ie9-vs-chrome-vs-firefox-vs-opera
http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/IE9-vs-Firefox-3-7-and-3-6-Chrome-5-0-and-4-0-and-Opera-10-50-3.png/

I thought I remembered a big test including IE9, but I think I'm remembering this piece from Tom's, which shows IE8 in last, but not very far behind Firefox.

In any case, I'm more impressed with Microsoft's work on IE9 than I've been by anything they've done recently (although I haven't played around with Windows 7 yet). I was happy with IE8 just because of the progress it showed from IE7, but IE9 is way beyond that, especially in terms of standards support. It won't make me stop using Opera, but it will definitely help me in my job developing web apps.

The thing that really pisses me off is the number of clients I have who still use IE6 (Avnet and Budget Truck, I'm looking at you), what's that 9 years old now? Thankfully, we don't need to test our applications with IE6 anymore, at this point we're responding to IE6 issues on an as-reported basis.

That might discourage journalists from taking up the profession altogether, especially considering the amount of non-notable tech journalism on the internet these days. And - horror of horrors - might subject them to actual quality standards. I recently emailed a journalist about the low quality of their article and learned that major tech blogs don't actually have an editorial staff.

I know that Intel destroys AMD in performance benchmarks and real-world performance, but AMD is FAR less expensive.
hmm, are you aware of any good comparisions between the best AMD chips and the best intel chips available at a given price point?

I tried to do one by taking a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/Performance-Index,1407.html, looking up prices on newegg and ingnoring pricessors that are either unavailable at newegg or are more expensive than a faster chip of the same brand and limiting myself to quad core chips I got the following in decreasing order of speed

Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition $969.99
Intel Core i7-950 $569.99
Intel Core i7-870 $569.99
Intel Core i7-920 $288.99
Intel Core i5-750 $199.99
AMD Phenom II X4 965 $194.99
AMD Phenom II X4 955 $160.99
AMD Phenom II X4 945 $150.99
Athlon II X4 630 $99.99

I got bored and stopped after this point

but while doing it I realised that toms hardware mostly only tests high end stuff so it isn't a very usefull comparision (in partcular there was only one i5 quad core in that list)

I just took a look at a toms hardware CPU chart ( http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/Performance-Index,1407.html ), picked out the intel CPU that came immediately above the AMD CPU you mentioned and looked up the price on newegg ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115215&cm_re=i5-750-_-19-115-215-_-Product ) and it was $5 more.

"If you're paying $400/yr, you're not a cheap bastard. Sorry to shatter your world-view, but you really aren't."

Agreed, who needs to spend $400 every year to keep up with games? Maybe if you throw in the price of the games I could easily see reaching $400 a year, but $400 on just hardware? Let's see, that's a new i7-920 and $200 left over for a decent motherboard and ram, so what are you going to buy next year? Ok, $400 for video card.... then what, new processor? Pretty sure the i7 920 wouldn't be outdated by 2012.

March 2008 you could have bought a Core 2 Quad Q9300 for $266 retail. That gives you $140 left for ram and mb. Let's say you went a little over, $140 wouldn't cut it, spent $240 on mb and ram, leaving you with $300 for 2009. Feb 2009 $300 would buy a Radeon HD 4850 X2 2 GB card. It's two 4850 GPUs built onto one PCI-E card, so basically it's like having two 4850 video cards. It should run everything you throw at it. So now it's March 2010, you have your Core 2 Quad 9300, your mb, your ram, and two 4850 video cards. What else do you need?

Skip the googling for reviewing and making sense of ad-laiden hardware sites with 25 pages of graphs.

Find charts and round-ups, gives you a real fast comparission of different hardware.

An example of a 'best graphics card for given money' kind of chart: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2569.html

Whatever is cheap, and well up the chart will do you just fine.

However, if you chose to build your own system, there is really only one way to do it: decide what you want to spend, and then buy the best components for the price. This takes all the guess work out of it. For a system like yours, you want to place a premium on CPU and GPU. I'd recommend the Intel Core i5 750 (the difference between the i5 and i7 is the i7 has hyper-threading, the i5 doesn't - but how many apps do you know of that can take advantage of 8 cores?). For GPUs, this chart is invaluable: Tom's Hardware Graphic Card Hierarchy Chart. Since NVIDIA just announced its latest line of cards, the 295 should drop in price relatively soon. From my experience, the GPU should be the most expensive component on your PC. I try to hit the $300 price point. At that price, you will be able to play all the new games at their high settings for at least 2 years, and your system will still be serviceable in 4.

The rest of your components are kind of extraneous. As a general rule, go for more, slower RAM (4 gigs of slower RAM will give you much better performance than 2 of the best). Your mobo will be tied to your CPU, so you won't have a ton of choice there. Avoid boards that cost less than $100 - they are unreliable. Avoid high RPM HDs - they are almost never worth the extra cost.

There is some great information out there, you just have to know where to look. You have to filter through some ads, but Toms Hardware still keeps good charts that go back quite a few revisions:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/

• Balanced PC: Part 1 - Part 1
• Balanced PC: Part 2 - Part 2
• Best Graphics Cards for the money
• Tom's Build Your guide

The BYO guide is a bit out of date now, but it'll help you get up to speed on processor architecture, motherboard chipsets, etc. From there of course ars technica, tom's hell even just browsing newegg's offerings will get you the rest of the way there.

Good luck.

• Balanced PC: Part 1 - Part 1
• Balanced PC: Part 2 - Part 2
• Best Graphics Cards for the money
• Tom's Build Your guide

The BYO guide is a bit out of date now, but it'll help you get up to speed on processor architecture, motherboard chipsets, etc. From there of course ars technica, tom's hell even just browsing newegg's offerings will get you the rest of the way there.

Good luck.

• Balanced PC: Part 1 - Part 1
• Balanced PC: Part 2 - Part 2
• Best Graphics Cards for the money
• Tom's Build Your guide

The BYO guide is a bit out of date now, but it'll help you get up to speed on processor architecture, motherboard chipsets, etc. From there of course ars technica, tom's hell even just browsing newegg's offerings will get you the rest of the way there.

Good luck.

• Balanced PC: Part 1 - Part 1
• Balanced PC: Part 2 - Part 2
• Best Graphics Cards for the money
• Tom's Build Your guide

The BYO guide is a bit out of date now, but it'll help you get up to speed on processor architecture, motherboard chipsets, etc. From there of course ars technica, tom's hell even just browsing newegg's offerings will get you the rest of the way there.

Good luck.

Tom's Hardware offers GPU hierarchy charts and recommendations in their Best Graphics Cards For The Money articles.

Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money

They do, but in how many pages ?

Tom's Hardware offers GPU hierarchy charts and recommendations in their Best Graphics Cards For The Money articles.

Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money

They do, but in how many pages ?

Tom's Hardware offers GPU hierarchy charts and recommendations in their Best Graphics Cards For The Money articles.

Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money

They do, but in how many pages ?

Any CPU with more than 2 cores, should be able to handle most of what you want... I've been testing a dual core Atom 330 at work, and it's actually easy to forget it's not a "real" CPU (unless some FPU-intensive screensaver comes on).

For mid-to-low-end systems, GPUs are really the discriminator ... what makes a difference with running games at decent resolutions and playing back video. The model numbers are nuts, but I tend to cross-reference a few places:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ - a good comprehensive list that boils down and ranks just about every card out there into a single (artificial) benchmark number.

Wikipedia also has surprisingly good coverage of every family of chip, and what products are based off of them and tables of supported features - crucial for system building. So I use it primarily to figure out things like: which nVidia Geforce is equivalent to which Quadro FX branded model, what is the fastest memory my "Barton" core Athlon would support, what the hell is the difference between a 2.2Ghz "Williamette" vs. a 2.2Ghz "Prescott", etc.

I've also taken a liking to checking with http://www.phoronix.com/ for Linux benchmarks and support for new hardware features and drivers... such as nVidia vs. ATi vs. Intel, which distribution has better VPDAU or audio support, etc.

And definitely once in a while read up on http://anandtech.com/ and http://tomshardware.com/ if it's been a while and you need a comprehensive explanation of new tech, such as SSDs or long-term price vs. performance investment strategies... those can really help you plan ahead (Intel & nVidia's tick-tock release cycle, finding the best value, and just generally knowing which buzzwords are important and which are just marketing rubbish.

With recent driver versions if you put an ATI card in your machine next to a nVidia one PhisX gets disabled.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-physx-ati-gpu-disable,8742.html

Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money

Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money

Ditto for CPUs: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money

I usually have to spend some time on Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/ That allows me to work out what I want, then I do a price comparison to find out what I can afford. It's a nuisance, and most computers nowadays don't come with a decent graphics card, so if you're a gamer, that takes even longer to research.