Last Updated on October 11, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
AnandTech was an online computer hardware magazine founded in April 1997 by then-14-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi. Shimpi remained CEO and editor-in-chief until August 2014, with Ryan Smith replacing him as editor-in-chief. The website was a source of hardware reviews for off-the-shelf components and exhaustive benchmarking, targeted towards computer-building enthusiasts. Its debut article, released April 3, 1997, was a review of AMD’s then-new K6 processor.
It was fitting that the underdog hardware site debuted with a review of the underdog CPU. Tom’s Hardware Guide left that door open, as Dr. Thomas Pabst showed little interest in AMD early on. Shimpi was a high school freshman at the time, and he hosted the site on Geocities. He soon outgrew Geocities and procured dedicated web hosting.
Anandtech’s impressive debut, if flawed
The K6 review missed some key details like price, or perhaps those details were removed after the fact once the pricing became obsolete. But it did cover what nobody else did: How the K6 performed on a 75 and 83 MHz front side bus. One of Tom’s Hardware Guide’s favorite tricks was running Pentiums on a faster front side bus, so of course we wanted to see what a K6 could do on that faster bus. Unfortunately Anandtech didn’t publish similar Pentium MMX or Pentium II benchmarks next to it, so you had to go over to Tom’s for that information.
Shimpi did note that you could close the gap in performance between AMD and Intel by adding a Diamond Monster 3D card. The price difference between the two CPUs nearly covered the cost of the card, although the review didn’t note that. But I’m being overly harsh. It wasn’t the best hardware review ever, but Shimpi was 14 when he wrote it. You have to start somewhere, and Shimpi proved a quick study. He learned hardware companies would take him seriously if he wore a suit, and his reviews grew in length and included more detail. I commend him for leaving his first review mostly as-is so others could see how a young tech journalist could grow.
I can’t find the page anymore, but I remember Shimpi saying early on that he planned to post new content more frequently than Tom’s Hardware did. And in those early days, he delivered. It’s possible that Shimpi drove Pabst to start producing content more frequently and turn his site into something more than just a hobby. I credit the early competition between Pabst and Shimpi with creating the PC hardware site genre.
My memories of Anandtech
Anandtech did drive me up the wall sometimes. I found an old blog post where I took issue with Shimpi’s review of AMD’s first SMP-capable chipset. This was a server chipset, not something consumers would be buying to play Quake. But Anandtech was a consumer-focused site at that time, not so much an IT-oriented site, and Shimpi still would have been a teenager.
But I also have to credit Anandtech with driving SSD adoption. Its review of the OCZ Vertex proved to the masses that affordable SSDs had arrived. Today we take SSDs for granted, but in 2009, this was groundbreaking–even controversial–stuff. Shimpi’s observation that SSDs made Windows Vista tolerable to use was a revelation. It sounded unbelievable at the time, but he was absolutely right.
Forums
Besides its prolific collection of reviews, Anandtech had a vibrant user forum that started in 1999. The forum had over 350,000 registered users and over 35 million posts covering a variety of topics. The social media site Reddit overshadows forums today, but in the days before Reddit, forums hosted on other sites provided a valuable avenue for user-to-user discussion. The Anandtech forums remain a useful resource for historical information, even if it’s no longer what it once was for current information. At the time of this writing, the Anandtech forums were still active.
History
In 2006, an AnandTech editor launched a spin-off called DailyTech, a technology news site. The move followed a similar evolution of the news section of AnandTech’s main rival, Tom’s Hardware, into TG Daily some months earlier.
Anand Lal Shimpi left Anandtech on August 30, 2014 to take a job at Apple Computer. He was 32 at the time. He named Ryan Smith as his successor. On December 17, 2014, about four months after Shimpi departed, Purch announced the acquisition of Anandtech.com. This brought Anandtech under the same ownership as its onetime rival, Tom’s Hardware.
In 2018, Anandtech and other Purch consumer brands were sold to Future.
On August 30, 2024, AnandTech announced that it had ended publication effective immediately, ending a 27 year run. Ryan Smith wrote the farewell, noting its first article was a review of an AMD CPU, and its last article was a review of the AMD Ryzen 9, published August 14, 2024.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.