Decorations up, tinsel everywhere... so it must be the time of the year for the awards to be dished out.
I"m no expert when it comes to hardware, but over at the Inq. they have posted their pick of the best hardware of this year, including:
CPU OF THE YEAR
GOLD Even though AMD is going through one of its periodic downs, it managed to intro a few surprises and gave Intel a run for its money. AMD finally realised that it had to use 333 MHz buses with its Athlons and the 2700+, the fastest AMD desktop chip so far, significantly improved performance and gave us the fastest processor that we"ve seen. It gets the gold gong for the Athlon 2700+.
BEST MOTHERBOARD
GOLD Epox" 8K9A2+, based on the KT400 chipsetthat we tested against a Nforce 2 and we believe this is the best board we"ve ever had in our hands. It has great features for overclockers and ordinary human beings too, a fancy North Bridge cooler that glows in a nice but not necessary blue light, an LED display that helps you to isolate errors, two S-ATA and 2 Raid controllers and all that you can wish from a motherboard. It"s the clear winner.