Mainboard of the Year. The Asus A7N8X squeaked in under the wire as it is now widely available. No doubt that the Asus A7N8X has been the best performance board for the enthusiast out there this year. While the nForce2 chipset has been a handful for many to make work, Asus finally took the bull by the horns with the A7N8X. With an excellent list of features, a great layout, overclocking abilities second to none, and a great price; it is hard to look elsewhere. Our review is here.

Video Chipset of the Year. This year ATI made itself known as the standard in quality and performance with their R300 VPU. To put it simply, the 9700 Pro and 9500 Pro products simply cannot be touched by the competition at the current time when it comes to high performance image quality. Currently I would have to suggest going the 9500 Pro route if you want to save a bit of cash as the GPU/VPU war is already heating up for next year and we are sure to see new products from both video giants before DOOM]|[ hits the shelves.

CPU of the Year. This is one of those times when we get to say, "We told you so." We had very high hopes for the Intel Northwood CPUs when they were launched at 2GHz, but had a feeling that the subsequent slower CPUs would be the ones that really shined when it came to best bang for the buck. The Intel Pentium 4 (1.6A) 1.6GHz CPU did not let the enthusiasts down as many of us found ourselves once again looking towards Intel for a reliable enthusiast solution. The 1.6A was everything the Celeron 300A ever was and more as we saw tons of aircooled OCs of 40% to 50%. 1.6A OCing is here.

Memory of the Year. Corsair is back for their third "[H]ardest" as well. I really have a hard time thinking what this last year of memory tweaking would have been like without Corsairs XMS memory. They have simply made tricking out a healthy memory bus easy. Where Corsair shines, and the others show their weakness, is the fact that Corsair's performance sticks are incredibly consistent in performance. You can buy Corsair Ram without the worry of getting a stick that does not work with your particular board. Corsair XMS is without a doubt the king of enthusiast ram. Although this next year looks as if it they might have some real competition for a change.

Mainboard Chipset of the Year. While I had my doubts that this would come to pass, I think it is now safe to say that NVIDIA has put together a product in their nForce line that shines above all the others out there. The nForce2 is sizing up to be the enthusiast chipset to have as this next year progresses. Kudos to NVIDIA for a long and challenging job well done. 2003 is looking up to be the year Intel comes back and takes this award again though, and we thought that their Granite Bay chipset might do it this year. Simply enough though, the Granite Bay just came nowhere close to as impressing us as much as the nForce2 did. Our PREview from July is here.

Video Card Manufacturer of the Year. While the work is farmed out, the products that have been delivered in ATI boxes this year have without a doubt been a better product than what we have seen in the past, and this certainly goes beyond the physical hardware itself. ATI made a lot of commitments to the hardware community last year, and while still not perfect, there is no doubt that their driver support, customer support, and hardware support have won over many this year. There is still room for improvement as we really want to see driver support step up to the level of their competition. Now to just get past that issue with them locking cards to prevent overclocking.

Now onto a few of the lighter categories!

HSF of the Year. Little has been done in the aircooling arena this year as it seems there is just so much you can do with a simple stream of air and a heatsink. Still there the best of the best are still out there. We highly suggest you look towards Alpha, Swiftech, and Thermalright for your quality cooling needs as all three have continued to impress us with quality components and terrific performance.

Cooling Product of the Year. A company that constantly pushes the envelope with their watercooling kits, Swiftech, has earned our choice for best cooling solution over the last year for the H202 Water Cooling Kit. This is certainly one of the most difficult categories to choose a single winner, making it almost appropriate to select watercooling technology, as a whole, for this year's winner. Watercooling technology has continued to evolve providing a safe and effective way to cool even the hottest of processors at a level that no HSF could hope to match.

Audio Component of the Year. This is a repeat from last year as well. Yes, we are aware that there are many other players in the market now when it comes to speakers, but we have yet to hear anyone do it as well or better than Klipsch with their 5.1 sound. No review, but I use them every day. A note as to what is to arrive this next year in the sound arena that might shake things up a bit is VIA's Envy sound chip. We are hoping it will hold great things in store.

Hard Drive of the Year. Again a repeat of last year as the much anticipated Serial ATA drives did not show up on store shelves although many of us now have mainboards with SATA controllers. Western Digital Caviar Drives with the 8MB buffer can simply not be touched when it comes to smooth performance for your desktop box. We are still stuck on 15K RPM Seagate Cheetahs for all of our server needs though.

Input device of the Year. This award has a very clear winner this year as we saw Logitech do some things that have never been done before. Their MX700 cordless mouse is without a doubt the best mouse I have ever used in my life. It is simply a work of art that works flawlessly on the desktop and is a comfort to hold in your hand. Best of all though, you can play games with it. I am not talking about The Sims either. I am talking about hardcore deathmatch in your favorite first person shooter as well. While the MX700 can be a bit expensive, I have to say that it is worth every penny that it cost me and I don't see mousing getting much better in the near future. The one issue though is training yourself to remember to drop it in the charger overnight.

Hardest Situation to Get Out Of. This is where we usually point the finger at the other guy for screwing the pooch and this year we have to point it squarely at ourselves. A single typo in one set of benchmarks in our 3GHz Intel Hyperthreading article led to further mistakes being made by myself. Moral of the story, make sure you have all the facts before you ever take any action. I have to extend an apology to some of our forum goers that were mistreated by myself. Certainly if we would have had the needed facts from credible sources at the time, we would not have made some of the decisions we did. As they say, "Live and learn", and we surely learned a lot that time around.

Hardest Disappointment to Swallow. After dragging us around the country and showing off the Parhelia as a pure gaming card, Matrox would not even send us a sample to review. Seems as the product got closer to launch, they began to "question our testing standards". I guess using real world games to show off performance and image quality was too much for them to bear. As it turned out, us not having to waste our time on a Parhelia debut review in some ways gave us back some of the time we wasted learning about it to begin with. Yeah, for the enthusiast the Parhelia sucks and Matrox knew it long before anyone else did.