With 2004 behind us now, we here at Viper Lair have looked at
a ton of products this past year. Some things caught our attention, and other things
not so much. In the end, we saw some interesting technology, and
put together a list of what we felt is truly deserving of recognition, and one company guilty of dipping its hands into the well once too often.
CPU of the
Year - Athlon FX: Despite the
fanfare of the LGA775 (and the Extreme Edition XE that followed),
AMD kept trucking away with their Athlon 64/FX. The FX-55
in particular has proven to be quite the gamer's CPU (as well
as providing excellent application performance), and despite
ringing in at over $800, it's still about $150 less than Intel's
finest.
Motherboard
of the Year - ASUS P5AD2 Premium: ASUS
grabbed Intel's 925X chipset and put forward the most comprehensive
package we've ever seen. While it wasn't the fastest Pentium
4 motherboard we've tested, with its triple RAID solutions, dual-Gigabit
LAN and support for PCI Express and DDR2, it's definitely
one of the most future-proof.
Chipset
of the Year - NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI: While the boards themselves are still a bit tough to find, if you're a gamer, the hunt will be well worth it. With support for AMD's Socket 939, dual PCIe NVIDIA GPUs, an upgraded hardware Firewall, as well as an impressive storage subsystem, this is a no brainer if you're looking for the best Doom 3 box. It'll run Half-Life 2 pretty good as well.
Memory
of the Year - Corsair Memory: This
year was rather blasé when it came to memory. Everyone
named George released some kind of PC4400 or low latency PC3200,
but Corsair always did it best. If you want speed and reliability,
you'll appreciate Corsair's attention to quality. Don't take
our word for it... put some ass ram in your system, and see
what happens. Honourable mentions are in order for Kingston
and Crucial though as they rank a close #2 and #3 in our books.
Video
Card of the Year - NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra: Probably
the most difficult choice we've had to make. To be honest,
ATI's X850 XT Platinum Edition makes a strong case against
NVIDIA's flagship, but the 6800 Ultra's ability to work in
SLI mode seals the deal. While the dollar per framerate improvements
when comparing NVIDIA SLI to a single X850 XT PE may seem
rather shocking in a bad way, if you're looking for ultimate
performance, this is the way to go. Just be sure to collect
those soda cans for recycling fees.
Small Form Factor of the Year - Soltek QBic Mania Series:
We only looked at a couple this past year, and although our
review won't be up until later this month, we've been thoroughly
impressed with Soltek's QBic Mania based on the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset. Quiet, stable and fast, the
only thing we had issue with was the design. Putting things
mildly, it's unique. Putting it bluntly, it's rather gaudy.
Hey, it's what's inside that counts, right?
Water Cooling Product of the
Year - Koolance Exos-Al: We've had some good water cooling kits come through the labs, but this year we decided to go with the best combination of performance and ease-of-use. While ensemble water cooling kits can be configured for better performance with drills and Dremels, the Koolance EXOS series doesn't require much more than a screwdriver.
Heatsink of the Year - Cooler Master Hyper 6:
Cooler Master didn't just beat the competition at the beginning of the year, they crushed them. The Hyper 6, almost a full year after reviewing it, still ranks in the top of its class in air cooling.
USB Product of the Year - CoolMax CD-510-U2:
For those of you who made the jump to SATA or even SCSI, you probably have an IDE drive sitting around doing nothing. What better way to have portable storage than using a USB 2.0 enclosure? While most enclosures perform about the same, we're smitten with the CoolMax's aluminum chassis and smart design.
Game of the Year - Half-Life
2: Another one we sat on the fence about. Far Cry was
my pick until about October, but the fight came down between
Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. We went with the latter as the game
play was more original, the story a little stronger, and the
graphics technology very close to the competition. It was
also more forgiving hardware wise than Carmack's latest.
The "meh" Event
of the Year - Intel 925XE & 3.46EE Product Launch:
Yeah, it happened on a Sunday of all days. Intel bumped their
925X and LGA775 CPUs to 1066FSB, up from 800FSB. Unfortunently,
it didn't really do much for performance and segmented their
Pentium 4 market even more as the new CPU won't work with
their chipsets released less than 4 months prior. Targeted
at gamers, it didn't come near the Athlon FX-55 which as a
platform is a good 20% cheaper.
The "boo and hiss" Award -
Infinium Labs: We'll spare everyone the drama here, as I'm sure many of you are aware of the story. Our take? It's a journalist's job to report. If you don't like what you hear, it's best to take your ball and go home.
The "Microsoft Wannabe" Award - Electronic Arts: EA has been buying up a lot of stock and signing exclusive deals near the end of 2004. While a lot of ire has been raised publically about this, the media in general have been fairly quiet. However you look at it, you can bet if this were the boys in Redmond, there would be a lot more fanfare.
That wraps up our look at this year's list. We're pretty excited
about 2005, as there will be some interesting technologies set
to be released. If
you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
