The PC Building Tools That Died (And What They Used To Do)

There is a particular kind of dead link that survives for years: the tool everyone recommended. It gets written into a hundred buying guides, cited in forum answers, bookmarked by people who build a PC once every five years, and then one day the server stops answering and nobody updates anything. The guides stay up. The links stay in them. The tool is gone.

We keep hitting these while checking our own outbound links, so this page is the running list, with what each one actually did while it was alive. Every status below was checked by requesting the domain and recording the response, not by reading someone else's roundup.

Status re-checked 3 August 2026. Free to cite with a link to bottleneckpc.com.

Changed since the last check: hwcompare has come back online. It was unreachable on 1 August and answers normally now, so it has moved to the still-running section below. There are two different kinds of dead on this list and the distinction is worth stating: outervision.com has no DNS record at all, while the three Boss domains still resolve and simply never answer. The second kind can come back without anyone touching a registrar. The first cannot.

Confirmed offline

Tool	What it did	Status
OuterVision Power Supply Calculator	Component-by-component PSU wattage	No DNS record at all
CPUBoss	Side-by-side CPU comparison	Resolves, server does not answer
GPUBoss	Side-by-side GPU comparison	Resolves, server does not answer
SSDBoss	Side-by-side SSD comparison	Resolves, server does not answer

OuterVision Power Supply Calculator

The one that leaves the biggest hole. OuterVision was the PSU calculator, the one hardware press and power supply manufacturers themselves pointed at, and it had been the default answer to "what wattage do I need" for well over a decade.

What made it good was the depth. A Basic mode took a handful of parts and gave you a number, which is all most people want. Expert mode let you specify individual components, add CPU and GPU overclocks, set utilisation hours, and then compare power supplies by efficiency certification, unit price, running cost and payback period. That last part is the bit nobody else bothered with: it answered not just how many watts, but whether an 80+ Gold unit would pay back its premium over the life of the machine. It also sized UPS units, which is why it turns up in home-server and rack guides as often as gaming ones.

It went without an announcement, on 7 September 2025. Two independent records agree on the date: that is the day of its last successful capture in the Internet Archive, and the day its registrar record was last modified, which is when the nameservers were removed. So this was not a server quietly falling over and nobody noticing - somebody took the DNS down deliberately, and said nothing.

There is now a site at outervision.site serving a power supply calculator, but that is a different domain and we cannot verify any connection to the people who built the original, so treat it as an unknown rather than a continuation.

If you need the wattage number today, ours is free and covers current cards including RTX 50 transient spikes: PSU calculator.

CPUBoss, GPUBoss and SSDBoss

Three sites, one shutdown. All three stopped responding together, which pointed at a single server going dark rather than three separate decisions - and on the 3 August re-check that guess turned into a fact. All three domains resolve to the same address, 104.41.149.144. It is one machine, and it has stopped answering while the DNS records that point at it stay perfectly intact.

CPUBoss launched in January 2013 and did one thing well: you picked two processors, and it put them side by side with specs, aggregated benchmark results pulled from around the web, and a blunt verdict at the top telling you which one won and roughly by how much. Before it existed, comparing two CPUs meant opening six tabs and doing the reading yourself.

GPUBoss followed that March with the same treatment for graphics cards, collapsing specs, benchmarks and review sentiment onto a single page.

SSDBoss completed the set for solid state drives.

The reputation was mixed and that is worth being honest about. The aggregate scores had a habit of weighting odd things heavily, and enthusiasts argued for years about whether the verdicts were trustworthy. But mixed reputation or not, they were linked constantly, and those links are now dead ends. If you are comparing two cards, our GPU pages carry current specs and street prices, and the bottleneck checker answers the pairing question those sites were usually being used for.

If you need a replacement today

The question that brings most people to this page is not "what happened" but "what do I use instead". Honest answers, including the ones that are not ours:

You used	For	Use now
OuterVision	PSU wattage sizing	Our PSU calculator - current cards, transient spikes, no signup. Manufacturer calculators (Cooler Master, Seasonic, be quiet!) work too but only quote their own units
OuterVision Expert mode	Efficiency payback math, per-part overclock modeling	Nothing live replicates this. Our power cost calculator covers the running-cost half
CPUBoss / GPUBoss	Raw spec side-by-sides	TechPowerUp's CPU and GPU databases; hwcompare for pre-RTX-50 comparisons
GPUBoss	"Will these work together"	Our bottleneck checker - per-resolution verdicts, honest ranges
SSDBoss	SSD comparisons	TechPowerUp's SSD specs database. We do not make an SSD comparison tool, so we will not pretend ours is one

Alive, despite what the roundups imply

Being listed next to a dead tool is not the same as being dead, and a few good ones keep getting written off:

• hwcompare is back. It did not answer at all on 1 August and was on our dead list; on 3 August it serves normally at hwcompare.com, with its GPU, CPU and SSD comparisons working. It diffs two spec sheets side by side without scores or verdicts, which is exactly what some people want. One caveat worth knowing before you rely on it: its GPU catalogue currently stops at the RTX 40 series, with no RTX 50 or RX 9000 cards, so it is useful for older comparisons and not for anything current. Being reachable and being up to date are separate questions.
• Can You Run It is still running, at systemrequirementslab.com/cyri. It checks a game's requirements against your actual system.
• PCPartPicker is fine, and still the best compatibility-and-price tool there is.
• UserBenchmark is still up. Its scoring remains contentious, which is a different argument from availability.
• Futuremark did not die, it moved. 3DMark and the rest live at benchmarks.ul.com after UL absorbed the brand.

Two more sit in a grey zone we would rather flag than guess at. fpsbenchmark.com answers, but serves a near-empty placeholder rather than a working tool. game-debate.com returns a block page to automated requests, so its server is clearly alive even though we cannot confirm from the outside what a normal visitor sees. Neither belongs on the dead list, and neither is behaving like a healthy site.

Why this keeps happening

Almost none of these announced anything. There was no farewell post, no redirect, no note on a social account. The domain simply stopped resolving, and because the tools were free, there was no billing relationship to alert anybody either. The people who linked them had no signal at all.

That is the honest lesson for anyone maintaining a resource page: an outbound link is a claim you are making on behalf of your readers, and it silently expires. Nobody tells you. We check ours because we would rather find it before a reader does, and this page exists because the checking produced something worth publishing.

If you maintain a guide that links any of the four above, that is the useful takeaway here. Search your own pages for those domains.

The bottom line

Four tools that thousands of guides still recommend are gone: OuterVision, CPUBoss, GPUBoss and SSDBoss. Can You Run It, PCPartPicker, UserBenchmark and Futuremark are all still running despite regularly being lumped in with them, and hwcompare has come back after being unreachable at the start of the month.

We re-check this list monthly and date it, because a dead-tools list that is itself out of date is worse than not having one. That is not a hypothetical: this page's first re-check moved a tool off the dead list, two days after publication. If you spot something here that has come back, or a tool that has quietly gone since we last looked, tell us and we will re-test it.

Related reading

• PSU calculator - the wattage number, with current cards
• Bottleneck checker - the CPU and GPU pairing question
• How accurate are bottleneck calculators? - our own methodology, including where the criticism lands
• PC building statistics - price and market data, free to cite