An important part of building or upgrading your own computer is knowing what components to source. Sometimes highly esteemed brands slip into the abyss - the latest being OCZ (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ocz-filing-for-bankruptcy-announces-offer-from-toshiba-to-purchase-assets-2013-11-27). After producing a line of SSDs with huge reliability problems, they never recovered and this week saw the final nail in their coffin when they declared bankruptcy.
The problem became apparent for those people following and reading reviews, and they shunned OCZ SSDs in droves.
Here is my list of good and reliable review sites. Feel free to suggest your own.
Crowd-sourced review sites. These sites typically have users/buyers reporting on their purchases and the quality of the feedback is highly variable. Read carefully and make sure you have a modicu, of tech savvy to differentiate between spurious bad feedback and genuine, informed feedback.
Newegg.com
Amazon.com
http://hardocp.com/
Ars Technica
Anandtech
Tom's Hardware and Tom's Guide (riddled with advertising, though)
phoronix (good for Linux information)
smallnetbuilder.com (networking and NAS)
http://www.notebookcheck.net/ (laptops, mobile graphics)
hardware.fr (French-only, but also the only site with component reliability stats)
PC Perspective (http://www.pcper.com/) (great for graphics and the first site to identify frame rate stutter problems with FRAPS benchmarks)
The Tech Report (http://techreport.com/)
EggXpert (Newegg affiliate site)
[H]ardOCP (http://www.hardocp.com/) Very useful for overclockers
For ultra low-level analysis:
Real World Tech (www.realworldtech.com)
Agner Fog's CPU blog (www.agner.org)
Lost Circuits (www.lostcircuits.com)
TechSpot.com does great CPU/GPU scaling articles
phones
www.gsmarena.com
I'd add storagereview.com (http://storagereview.com) to that list.
I found a great monitor review site: http://www.blurbusters.com/
Interesting site that compares games and the requirements to run it.
http://www.game-debate.com/
Check for each game under the "Games" menu and also the "Can I run it" section.
I looked at the "Can I run it" from game-debate and it is okay, but I personally use http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri for checking that.
Granted, it has to install an app to get the system details, but if a person doesn't know them it's a bit easier. Plus it isn't limited to EA games.
Another great site for monitor reviews.
https://pcmonitors.info/
Maybe I should consolidate all these links in the top post and sticky this?
Edit: also a great review site for general electronics.
http://thewirecutter.com/