[H]ard|OCP

Mainboard of the Year. We've never given the MOTY award to an entire series of board, but this year that's exactly what we're going to do. ABIT went above and beyond the call of duty and started what we hope will be a trend in the industry. Their MAX3 active mainboard component cooling technology is a needed and welcomed innovation, especially for the hardware enthusiast. The MAX3 technology launched with ABIT's IC7 series board and has now stretched to their AMD boards as well. ABIT has done a great job keeping the mainboard industry exciting this year with the introduction of another great enthusiast feature that will undoubtedly become the norm as we move forward. Our review of the IC7-MAX3 is here.

Video Processor of the Year. ATI follows up 2002 with another VPU award from [H]. This time we are going to focus on the mainstream rather than the high-end parts. The technology behind the Radeon 9600 has certainly enhanced the game playing experience of many in the last twelve months, as very affordable 9600s, 9600 SEs, 9600Pros, and 9600XTs have been readily available. NVIDIA had a chance here this year, but finally coming to market in December and with very little penetration does not an award of the year make. ATI has been on target all year long fulfilling the true needs of gamers.

CPU of the Year. Many of you came back to the "dark side" this year and with very good reason. This year Intel did not disappoint us when it came to introducing an incredible enthusiast CPU. The Intel Pentium 4 2.4C found a home in many of our boxes this year and gave us 600MHz to 1.2GHz overclocks! Amazingly enough, it joins the ranks of the 300A, along with last year's winner the P4 1.6A. From what we're being told, there might very well be a Prescott gem out there for us as well. AMD does deserve mention here as well as many of us still flocked to Athlon XP 2500+ CPUs, though not receiving the raw mega-returns seen by the P4s. Initial 2.4C OCing is here.

Memory of the Year. Kingston threw their hat into the enthusiast ring this year with their HyperX memories and they made a big splash. We wondered if they were going to follow up their introduction with more solid enthusiast products, and it turns out that's exactly what they did all year long. We've used gigs and gigs worth of Kingston HyperX memory in our product testing this year, and it has proven to be a truly solid enthusiast product that [H]ard|OCP can fully recommend to anyone. With that said, Corsair has again given us tremendously worthwhile products this year, but HyperX gets the prize as they waded into a new market and did a great job as well.

Mainboard Chipset of the Year. It was a tough call on this one. It was between Intel....and Intel. Since we look at things from an enthusiast perspective, the Canterwood and Springdale chipsets from Intel allowed many of us to gain 1GHz overclocks on our Intel CPUs this year. Many of the mainboards doing this were "PAT enabled" i865PE chipset-based boards. A number of board builders such as ABIT, Asus, and MSI found ways to tweak the memory timings of the i865PE, giving it better performance than the flagship i875P chipset in many cases while still remaining a pinnacle of stability. Our first tweaked i865PE review is here.

Video Card Manufacturer of the Year. This award is a bit different than in previous years. Quite frankly, no one really stands out in my mind in the sea of competition. That's not to say there aren't great companies building great video cards, but we want to focus on something a bit different than just quality products this time round. Having said that, Asus gets our spotlight this year for breaking the mold in the way retail video card business has been done for several years now. Asus broke out of the "NVIDIA Only" niche and now offers us quality products from both ATI and NVIDIA. We hope to see many other companies follow their example as it will be nothing but a positive move for the consumer. Asus has balls and it shows.

Cooling Product of the Year. Without a doubt, the Koolance Exos has earned its stripes here with us on our test bench this year. We have experienced watercooling kits from every major player, and the Koolance rises head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to the complete package. There are some other kits out there that perform a bit better, some that are quieter, and some that are a bit cheaper, but when it comes to use and system setup, the Koolance Exos is the way to go. You don't need any watercooling experience and very little setup is actually needed. Not having a Koolance now days would be like not having a remote control for the TV. You can still change channels, but doing so would be a royal pain. The Exos is easily the best introductory and mainstream watercooling product on the market. Our first Exos review is here.

Audio Component of the Year. PC speakers have come into their own in the last couple of years and this year true 24-bit audio followed suit, as we thought it might, with VIA's Envy24 PCI Multi Channel Audio Controller. VIA's Vinyl Audio isn't just being used on add-in PCI cards and soon to be PCI-Express cards. VIA has also given us the Envy24-HT chipset, something we are finding on many mainboards as an on-board solution that delivers incredible sound. With VIA producing this top-end chip, we are going to see the product landscape continue to change in the next year as it directly impacts end users with better technology for less money.

Hard Drive of the Year. SATA drives finally arrived, but without the Western Digital Raptor to make SATA Controllers look good, there would have been little fanfare. With that said, without inexpensive integrated SATA RAID controllers on our mainboards, many of us wouldn't have seen any benefit beyond our normal ATA drives. While a bit expensive, a RAID 0 set of Raptors can launch you close to near SCSI performance on your desktop for much less than what most SCSI RAID solutions would cost you. We're glad SATA is finally here and are very happy the Raptors were around to make it look good. Our review is here

Hardest Disappointment to Swallow. I don't think many of you will have to think long before having the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra come to mind. Almost eight months after the ATI 9700 Pro came to market, NVIDIA failed to bring forth a truly competitive product. It left us all with the same thought, "$400 for that? You're kidding, right?" Our initial preview is here.

Hardest Blow to the Industry. Take everything sacred and use it for toilet paper, then lie about it with smooth PR statements that duck any responsibility. NVIDIA and Futuremark still owe the enthusiast community a heartfelt apology, but don't hold your breath as you'll surely pass out before that ever happens. Thanks to both of them for making us all feel like we needed a shower. I sure hope the money was worth it. The canned benchmark is dead, long live the canned benchmark!