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VL's Editor's Choices of 2004: Another year has gone by, and we gather up our list of who rocked, and who sucked.
Date: January 3, 2005
Manufacturer: N/A
Written By:


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.

Athlon FX 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.

ASUS P5AD2 Premium 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.

NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI 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.

Corsair Memory 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.

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 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.

Soltek QBic Mania Series 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?

Koolance Exos-Al 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.

Cooler Master Hyper 6 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.

CoolMax CD-510-U2 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.

Half-Life 2 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.

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