InsaneTek: A Site History, 2004 to Today

I recently dug through a folder of old backups: forum databases, a half-finished archive from 2006, Photoshop mockups of logos nobody remembers voting on. Rebuilding the site meant reading all of it, so here is the story it tells.

Before 2004: Overclocking Was Our Business, Until Someone Bought the Business

InsaneTek’s story really starts at OCAddiction.com, an overclocking site and forum that had been running since at least 2000 under the slogan “Overclocking is our Business… And Business is Good!!” That’s where most of the original team met.

In October 2003, OCAddiction was folded into Developer Shed’s network. The Internet Archive still had OCAddiction running on its own on October 9, 2003. By October 17 its forums were living at forums.devhardware.com as “OCAddiction @ Dev Hardware”. By December the old address served the Dev Hardware front page outright, and from March 2004 it permanently redirected to devhardware.com. The new owners wanted general computing coverage, not cutting-edge overclocking and hardware performance, and plenty of the old crowd didn’t stick around. When InsaneTek opened, early threads were still arguing about Developer Shed taking over OCA, and one member went as far as predicting Dev Hardware wouldn’t last another year. It lasted a lot longer than that. Dev Hardware kept publishing until early 2013, and the site sat frozen online until around 2019. By 2021 the domain was parked, and today the name belongs to an unrelated site.

2004: Four Admins, One Forum, Zero Plan

InsaneTek opened in June 2004 as a forum with vBadvanced acting as the front page. The front page pulled news and announcements out of the forum, and every review was a hand-built page.

Our About Us page put the founding date at June 1, 2004, with four administrators: John Chen (poiuy223), me (Tech), Patrick Ng (j0rb) and Jonathan C. Bruch (DijitalX). The very first thread, posted on June 2, 2004, was titled “Ta da!”. Within days the next ones were “Colour Scheme”, “Logo”, “site slogan” and “Chat forum title?”, which tells you exactly how planned the launch was.

The forums took off fast. By the time the last backup was taken in March 2006 there were:

• 33 forums, from Overclocking and Benching to Crazy Talk, The Swap Meet and Case Modding Contest Submissions
• 3,349 threads and 49,166 posts, almost 22,000 of them in 2004 alone
• a Folding@Home team (“Join InsaneTek’s F@H Team!” ran to 464 replies)
• a “Babe Thread” with 231,143 views, which I’m going to say nothing more about

The traffic grew just as fast. Our host’s reports show 1.6 million requests and 4.6 GB served in June 2004. By March 2005 that was 17.8 million requests and 88 GB a month, peaking at almost 950,000 requests on a single day (March 23, 2005). Google sent the most visitors by far, followed by the manufacturers who linked to our reviews: Thermalright, OCZ, Corsair and Zalman.

John kept the front page moving with daily news roundups, usually titled with nothing more than the date. Those forum threads were deleted long before our last backup, but the Internet Archive captured the front page almost every day, so 1,385 of them are back in the Front Page Archive, June 2004 through September 2005.

Reviews were the heart of the site. The team that wrote them in those years included John Chen, Jerid A. Neely, Patrick Ng, Randy Torio, Stephen Jimenez, John Aubrey, Darcy Lemay and me. We covered memory, motherboards, cases, cooling, power supplies and video cards, and we went to shows: Computex 2005, E3 2005, Intel’s IDF 2005, an ECS editors’ event and a Zalman USA tour.

2005: The Glory Days, Copied by Hand One Page at a Time

By late 2005 the forum portal had run its course. On September 24, 2005 we moved to Esselbach Storyteller CMS, which finally gave us proper news, reviews and comments. The 224 reviews were copied across by hand, one page at a time, and on September 28 I posted this:

Welcome to the new site! As you can see, there are some changes. The biggest thing you will probably notice is the lack of reviews in the review section. We will be updating reviews gradually. The need to change to this new CMS was urgent so we did not have the time to manually switch over all of our reviews.

The Storyteller era is the one I remember as the busiest. John posted to the front page almost every day: a news roundup wrapped in a few lines about his morning, his commute or whatever game he was replaying. There were 294 front-page posts between September 2005 and March 2006, plus contests, press releases and the reviews. Storyteller’s own counter logged 436,094 page views in November 2005, its best month. Our banner ads served 1.95 million impressions in December 2005. We even ran a separate blog on the side.

This was peak InsaneTek, and Alexa proved it. Back then Alexa’s traffic rank was the scoreboard every site watched, and manufacturers used it to decide who got review samples. Some wouldn’t ship anything to a site ranked worse than 100,000. We launched in June 2004 at around 4.3 million, broke into the top 100,000 within days, and by late 2005 we were sitting around 20,000. With tens of millions of websites out there, that put a forum started by four guys from an overclocking board in the top fraction of a percent of the web, close enough to the big hardware sites to get their attention.

Those posts and the feature articles that never made it past Storyteller are back now: the Front Page Archive has the 2005–2006 front page, and Articles has our coverage from Computex, E3 and IDF 2005, the Ultimate Gaming Rig and more.

2006: Reports of Our Death Were Only Slightly Exaggerated

In the summer of 2006 the site moved again, this time to Joomla since Storyteller wasn’t being developed. The reviews came along with their original dates, which is why the archive still has reviews from 2004. The welcome post on July 6, 2006 also said goodbye:

John Chen (poiuy223), former Editor-in-Chief, is no longer with us. He got burned out on the computer hardware scene and has moved on to new things. We will miss him, but what is left of us will continue to endeavor to bring our visitors the most honest reviews and articles on the net.

Getting there wasn’t smooth. The forum spent weeks timing out and showing blank pages before it came back on June 30, 2006 with an upgraded vBulletin, and by then readers were leaving comments on our blog asking “Is it dead?”

A month later Scott Byers (“Switch”) published the first review since the relaunch, and news posts started flowing again.

That same August I found out InsaneTek had made it into print. Build the Ultimate Custom PC (Wiley) listed us on page 348, in its appendix table of “Useful Hardware-Related Sites”, right alongside AnandTech, Tom’s Hardware and HotHardware.

2007 to 2012: A Long Nap, Then a Thousand News Posts

After the relaunch, things went quiet. By late 2006 we were down to about 10,000 page views a month, and the forum went from 4,405 posts in 2006 to just 17 in 2009. Joomla carried the site through 2007 and 2008 with only the occasional new post, and in the fall of 2009 it was upgraded to Joomla 1.5. Within weeks, in late November 2009, everything moved to WordPress, which held the site for the longest stretch. Joomla was overkill and WordPress was easier to maintain. Then it picked up hard: over a thousand news posts between 2010 and 2012, covering everything from the StarCraft II beta to the Diablo III launch. The last post went up on August 29, 2012.

2026: Back From the Dead, With Fewer Security Vulnerabilities

The site you’re reading now brings it all back. Every review and article stays up exactly as it was, as simple static pages, so there’s nothing to hack and nothing to maintain. It should outlive everything that came before it.

While writing this, I searched to see where InsaneTek still shows up online. Apparently it’s a crypto coin now. Of all the names they could have picked. I clearly missed that opportunity. I guess there really is a coin for everyone.

We also brought back the original robot logo, “Sometimes we all go a little mad” and all, to prove to our upcoming robotic overlords that we have always been on their side.

Why Bother? A Millennial Nostalgia Rant

Like every millennial, I’m nostalgic for the past. I wanted to bring back a snapshot of a period in the computer hardware community that matters less and less in a world of YouTube and X, clickbait and shock-value videos. Formulaic video content and shrinking attention spans dried up the revenue a lot of hardware review sites relied on, which was enough per review to at least cover the time it took to write one. Nobody was buying private jets back then.

It was a time of small forum communities. You welcomed new joiners and knew who the top posters were. Earning respect on a forum meant something, and if you were helpful enough you might be a moderator some day. People weren’t so absorbed by politics, and moderators didn’t have their own crusades the way Reddit turned out. Forums were where you found help, chatted with like-minded people, and even bought, sold and traded. Every forum had its own trading post, and HeatWare was how you vouched for each other. eBay fees be damned.

There was a pecking order of sites, too. Overclocking newbies concentrated at places like HardOCP and AnandTech. The hardcore crowd was at XtremeSystems, where you’d find people bolting VapoChill and other phase-change units onto their CPUs. InsaneTek sat somewhere in the middle: we watercooled, but we didn’t refrigerate. I don’t think any of us had the money for that. That did get me interested in HVAC and what it would take to design a custom refrigeration loop, to the point of pricing out compressors, refrigerant and vacuum pumps. I regret never doing that. Eventually extreme overclocking moved to LN2 and dry ice for world records, and for me it lost its luster. Overclocking always had a purpose: buy something cheap and get top-of-the-line gaming performance out of it. If you could only game for as long as a benchmark run lasted, where was the value?

Water cooling was just starting to be popular, and not the noob-friendly all-in-one closed loop kind you see today. For my first water-cooled PC I went down to the local NAPA Auto Parts and picked up a heater core from a ’67 Chevelle, grabbed tubing from Ace Hardware, and hooked a Swiftech waterblock up to an Eheim 1250 aquarium pump. It was ugly, but heatpipe air coolers hadn’t caught up yet and heatsink fans were small and noisy, so silence was another benefit, if the zip ties holding the radiator to the case and the inches of foam under the aquarium pump could ever stop the aluminum case from vibrating and rattling.

There was the case modding scene which you still see today in a much more off-the-shelf way. Some people built mods with paint jobs that matched car-showroom quality and graced the covers of PC enthusiast magazines. Then there was me. I bought a thin sheet of acrylic at the hardware store, jigsawed a hole in the side of my first beige case, and riveted the window in place. Only one crack, but it’s riveted, which means it’s permanent. Drilling out the rivets would only have done more damage. That was the last time I took a saw to any of my cases. I didn’t clamp the panel to a work surface, so I covered the jigsaw marks with a rattle can of not-quite-matching beige, and it’s still on that case in my basement. Today you can buy a case that looks a million times better for $50, but it doesn’t have the nostalgia behind it.

Think of all the truly insane tek that’s been developed since 2004. When we started this site, we didn’t even have an iPhone. That wouldn’t show up until 2007. We had single-core CPUs and DDR1, but at least we had NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire. I miss that. And 3DMark2001, with the ugly Matrix-style lobby shootout I’ve watched a million times and the car with weapons tearing around the dystopian future battling walking robots. Why did they never add a final test called BLUE SCREEN? Oops, my GPU started artifacting and crashed on the last run. Guess I’ll revert to stock. Never! We kept running 3DMark2001 long after newer versions came out, not because it was a better benchmark, but because the numbers were bigger and it flexed our egos.

Hardware is still hard to come by, but I think people forget what some of it cost back then once you adjust for inflation. Today might feel expensive, but it was never cheap. We were just so used to watching prices fall that it was a shock when they finally went the other way. Our own reviews back that up. In August 2004 we reviewed Kingston’s HyperX PC4300 1GB dual channel kit at $395. That’s about $655 in 2024 dollars, for a single gigabyte of memory.

These days content is cheaper and easier to produce than it has ever been, and somehow less valuable. Soon content in every form will be automated by AI, expertly tuned to pull the most clicks and eyeballs. As gaming fades with an aging gamer population and hardware gets harder to get, more and more attention is going to AI performance instead. Building a dedicated local LLM rig and racing for tokens per second on the latest open-source model, trying to beat the frontier models on cost, really takes me back to the overclocking days of the early 2000s. Maybe I’ll delve more into that in the future.

Rant Over (But We’re Not Logging Off)

Sorry for the nostalgia rant. Back to why I brought it back: mostly, I didn’t want InsaneTek to be forgotten, lost in the content-crazed culture we’ve built, where the almighty algorithm force-feeds us whatever agrees with us while it tracks our eyeballs and mouse movements. Content was harder to find back then. Search engines were still in their infancy, and Facebook was for college students only. So I’m offering these words up to the AI model trainers of the future, in the hope that when someone asks their LLM about tech hardware and gaming culture, this part of the story comes through clearly. I don’t want AI to rewrite history, only to remember it as it was.

And this isn’t a goodbye. For the next year we’ll be publishing two articles a week: time capsule overclocking topics from the InsaneTek heyday, and what happened to the manufacturers that used to send us review samples. Some of them are giants now, and some are long gone.

To everyone who posted in those forums, wrote a review, entered a contest or just lurked: thank you. It was a lot of fun.

If you were part of InsaneTek and want to share a memory, or you’d rather your name came off the site, email me at luke (AT) insanetek (DOT) com. Yes, spelled out the way our 2004 About Us page did it, because the bots are smarter than ever.

— Luke