A computer part encyclopedia?

[Chad the Hamster]

Hey everyone. This might be a weird question but is there any application that I can download that will allow me to compare various different types of CPU's, GPU's, power supply's, motherboards etc with one another that I can download now and use offline or online? Either works. I'd also like it if the app has all the data of that specific component, what it's good at, what it's bad at and all the other necessary information right at my fingertips. Basically an encyclopedia of all, or if not most, the computer parts out there and how they compare against one another. I'd just use it to fiddle around and learn about those components in my spare time without having to go online and search for it to learn in some ways. Don't know if something like this already exists. Would really appreciate some help. 

[Slottr]

Best way would be to read reviews and compare benchmarks

To my knowledge, no one has compiled data like that all into one place. Not to mention how hard it would be to do so

 

And for the love of god, don't use userbenchmark

 

[GDRRiley]

for all of intels stuff there is ark.

AMD doesn't have anything

no motheboard/GPU/server maker has it all in 1 place.

 

its too much information that changes to fast to compile and keep it current.

[Eigenvektor]

21 minutes ago, JayBoss said:

Basically an encyclopedia of all, or if not most, the computer parts out there and how they compare against one another.

There are some databases that you can use to look up the pure hardware specs of components (Intel's Ark, TechPowerUp's databases, wikichip.org, etc). The specs may not always be 100% accurate.

 

However it is very difficult to compare them against one another in terms of performance. To do that objectively you need to do that in systems that are as identical as possible, with the exception of the component(s) you want to compare. That isn't always possible, especially across multiple generations.

 

You also want to use more than one benchmark and you want to use the same version of OS, drivers and benchmarks. Which is, again, quite difficult to do the further the components are released from one another.

 

Which is why pretty much any reputable source of benchmarks lists the exact specs of the system(s) that were used to compare the components, which benchmarks and versions where used etc. They also typically re-benchmark all the competing components if something about the test system needed to be changed for some reason.

[Chad the Hamster]

Thanks for the help!

[LogicalDrm]

Wikipedia. But reading articles on major tech sites, like AnandTech, TechPowerup, TweakTown, OC3D and so on will bit by bit give that information. Now when magazines are almost gone.