I feel like this has to be said; sometimes to do it right, you’ll have to do it yourself.

The tech industry produces hundreds, if not thousands of new products every month and review sites usually only gets to review the “hot” ones that are most likely to sell in their product line and most stay unreviewed; that means that not every useful metric is actually available in easily formatted, digestible pieces.

That’s why some us need to go into the depths of the internet to sift out key product information that those marketing people refuse to put into their brochures (for some reason, but that’s another grievance for another time). “But where would I find these?” You might ask, good question.

To the savvy buyers, those who like to see the hard numbers, statistics, results before handing over your hard-earned cash; to those informed customers, here is a post dedicated to you guys. Here are the top 5 websites I’d recommend to anyone researching on the next product that they want to buy; no reviews, no opinions, just pure stats!

Nothing fancy, but very helpful!

Panelook

This is the most comprehensive place by far I’ve found to look up specific panel and part numbers to obtain their spec sheets. I have yet to find a panel that doesn’t exist in their database. This is especially useful for those who want to upgrade or replace their existing laptop screens but have no idea what they should be looking for.

Here it displays their typical brightness, color accuracy, DeltaE and the sort of connector you are looking for (either a 30 or 40 lane eDP for most cases) that you don’t usually get in a typical product brochure. Its typically much cheaper to DIY your replacement too, if you’re looking to save on that. Highly recommended.

You can access their website here

Ark.Intel

Intel makes processors, a lot of processors. So much so that they actually have a dedicated portion of their site dedicated to keeping track of all the specifications of those damn things.

 These are useful when you need to see all the product features and hardware accelerated processes that might be needed for certain use cases. Here you can generally estimate the processing power by looking at the lithographic node, core count and TDP; especially useful for Ultrabooks or sub-notebooks that use low power parts that defy the traditional numbering scheme of Intel’s processors (like the i5-8265U for example, bet you didn’t know that existed).

You can check out their repository here

LG for example, manufactures truckloads of monitors; most of which goes unreviewed

Display Specifications

I know, weird name for a site, right? Well this site does what it says on the tin; show you the display specifications on a large array of released monitors and TVs with specifications that you usually wouldn’t find on an advert. Categorized by manufacturing year, it allows you to easily spot whether that particular monitor you’ve seen on a sale is actually just a clearance price for one of their older monitors in stock.

Of course, the essentials are all covered here. Things such as panel model number, panel bit display, FRC, exact dimensions in more than one metric and the most important of all; the display technology behind the monitor in which some brochures fail to clarify (I’ve seen “IPS” being thrown around monitors that are actually using VA or AVHA technology, similar, but very different). What’s more, it even has a compare feature for monitors!

You can access their website here

Notebookcheck mobile GPU Comparison

Not only a great, comprehensive review site, their website also has a comprehensive database for almost all laptop GPUs that have existed for the past 15 years or so. It allows you to easily glace at whether your computer is able to run a particular game or not, along with any tested synthetic benchmarks that they may have used.

It has also been categorically labelled using their general performance results so you can tell at a glance from the wall of performance numbers what you should expect from a particular model (a tier list, basically)

You can access their gaming benchmarks here and their synthetic benchmarks here

Anandtech desktop GPU Comparison

Need one for desktop counterparts? No worries, Anandtech has you covered. It basically does the same thing as Notebookcheck’s GPU comparison but in a more 1-to-1 format, pitting 2 GPUs that pulls the results of both that are using the same benchmarks.

You can go visit it here. Of course, they have one for CPUs too, which you can access it here.

Chia is the horse-author from the far flung year of 2153. While not grazing on grass pastures or reviewing old time-y games and technology from the early 21st century pretending to not know what comes next (as to not disturb the space-time continuum), he can be seen exchanging vast quantities of Earth currency for parts needed to fix his damaged space ship.