The bit-tech Hardware Awards 2007

Hey, ASUS wasn't the first company to solder RAM chips to the motherboard... PCChips did it before. That, and soldering CPUs as well.

"Best Graphics Card" should have outright been ATi's (purportedly mid-range) HD3850. Incroyable, bit-tech..... Jesus Christ, come on...

**edit: you guys don't review more than one brand of audio cards, either? There are some very decent under-the-radar ones out there, including cards with full x64 driver support equipped with superb chips.

**edit: "Most Innovative Company"?! What the f*ck....? I don't really see a relevant connection with particular products, nor the value of the award and the accompanied insight to the consumer.

Originally Posted by Amon
"Best Graphics Card" should have outright been ATi's (purportedly mid-range) HD3850. Incroyable, bit-tech..... Jesus Christ, come on...

The Radeon HD 3850 is a good card, but we didn't think it was the best graphics card of the year... the decision in the office was a unanimous one. And given the trend for games is moving towards 512MB of onboard memory to play with the highest texture details and the 3850's default 256MB memory size, it'd be a strange choice.

**edit: you guys don't review more than one brand of audio cards, either? There are some very decent under-the-radar ones out there, including cards with full x64 driver support equipped with superb chips.

We have reviewed Creative, Asus, HT Omega, Sondigo and a couple of others I believe, so I'm not sure where that comment comes from.

**edit: "Most Innovative Company"?! What the f*ck....? I don't really see a relevant connection with particular products, nor the value of the award and the accompanied insight to the consumer.

Did you actually read the list on that page of... wait... products from one company that pushed the boat out several times this year? I'm guessing not, but thanks for your comments.

From your review of the HD 3850, it seemed to me the card served up some quality numbers across the board in the presence of 512MB competitors. Not offering a defense for the card, but if buffer size is your concern, abundant numbers of vendor-limited 512MB versions of the board have been floating around.

The award for most innovative company simply doesn't make sense. We normally don't see this type of award in, say, the automotive market for "most innovative automaker". It doesn't help the buyer choose a product from a diverse selection of companies at all.

Humour me for a moment and consider that a Prius and Civic are on your list of top considerations based not only on either car's exhaustive list of awards but overall match to your needs. But suddenly Toyota receives the "most innovative" trophy. Now what? You still haven't got a clue which to choose because that trophy offers no insight whatsoever to any advantages gained from buying from "the most innovative" brand nor if the innovation that trophy was awarded for is even present in that specific Prius. Make the connection with shopping for computer components and you'll still arrive to an inconclusive indifference.

So, Asus gets the gold medal for being a repeat winner of good opinion for good products. But innovation in this context would imply an evolution, or creation, of computer solutions. From what I've read multiple times on that page, the latter half of your cited innovations seem to be awards for mediocre products that were the result of a trial-error experimentations with largely unnecessary solutions. I see that as neither innovative nor pushing the envelope of their respective segments, but rather a loosely conjured "let's try this" campaign. I'm also reading an uncomfortable pliancy in your journalistic neutrality if this "most innovative company" award is truly awarded for your shaky reasoning. If anything, "most successful/decorated company" would have been a more fitting title for your described award, but even then, I'd continue to be on the fence about it as it still doesn't serve up any constructive criticism for their particular products when your readers are out there shopping for them.

It just seems like a very farfetched--and utterly unnecessary--change of theme from your very particular awards for specific segments to overall evaluation of corporate success with the weird--or, in this scenario, repeat product experimentation from the same company, yielding some mixed results. To the consumer, product brand, for this reason, should be of no consideration.

Originally Posted by Amon
From your review of the HD 3850, it seemed to me the card served up some quality numbers across the board in the presence of 512MB competitors. Not offering a defense for the card, but if buffer size is your concern, abundant numbers of vendor-limited 512MB versions of the board have been floating around.

We haven't actually published our review of the 3850 yet, because I wanted to do more than just compare it to cards above it with ultra-high texture details designed for more than 256MB of on-board memory... All that it would have done is paint the 3850 in a bad light and tell you very little about what you can expect from the card.

While we don't do the whole 'best playable' thing any more, but we do take into account that a 256MB card can't really perform as well as a 512MB card in situations where you're limited by memory size because the textures are too big to fit into its high-speed dedicated graphics memory.

Most tech-savvy people would know that this is the case, so it seems to make no sense to say the card sucks at higher texture settings... because to me that's obvious. In actual fact, the 3850 is a damned good card for the money providing you know the limitations of it. :)

I think you're getting mixed up with the 3870, which we have published a review on. That's a good card... no wait, I'll rephrase that... it's a GREAT card and it received very notable mentions in both best graphics card and best innovation categories. But, we felt that the 8800 GT broke some serious ground in the mid-range, offering near 8800 GTX performance for £160-£175 (or higher, depending on clock speed) and the 3870 couldn't match that on the performance stakes.

If you think about that for a minute... the 8600 GTS 256 cost around £140-150 (and even higher) in April and it pales in comparison to both the 3870 and the 8800 GT.

Either card is simply fantastic, but we think the 8800 GT still pips the 3870 at the post... albeit by a nose. If we could have awarded both cards best graphics card of the year, we would have done. Unfortunately we can't do that and we had to come to a decision.

Regardless of that though, the 3870 and 8800 GT are both fantastic graphics cards and that's good for the consumers right?

I must have read the 3850/3870 review elsewhere and confused it with your article. In said review, the 3850 was right up the 3870's ass on several occasions. I'm probably just be one whose opinion has more stake in price and value than bit-tech might.

Originally Posted by Amon
Humour me for a moment and consider that a Prius and Civic are on your list of top considerations based not only on either car's exhaustive list of awards but overall match to your needs. But suddenly Toyota receives the "most innovative" trophy. Now what? You still haven't got a clue which to choose because that trophy offers no insight whatsoever to any advantages gained from buying from "the most innovative" brand nor if the innovation that trophy was awarded for is even present in that specific Prius. Make the connection with shopping for computer components and you'll still arrive to an inconclusive indifference.

Actually by your analogy knowing that Toyota was an innovative company might sway a fair few people opinions. If there's nothing to choose between the vehicles themselves because they match up spec for spec based on my needs I am going to start looking at the companies that make them. If one company has an award, be it for innovation, reliability, clean floors in the showrooms or whatever then it says something about the company, its employees and work ethic which in turn is likely to filter down in to the products it produces so that, even if it doesn't show up on a list of product specifications directly, it gives me another perspective.

If we're talking specifically about Asus, you see products like the Eee PC which is pretty much as practicle as any UMPC but has the benefit of actually being good, not insanely overpriced and thus popular. The Asus Blitz deserves accolade, as stated in the article, for offering the only 'real' crossfire solution on a P35-chipset based motherboard; cards may not be able to saturate a x8 slot at the moment, but a x4 slot does limit performance so being able to save the £60-100 more you'd need to buy a decent X38 board to use crossfire is a fantstic innovaion - and no-one else has yet copied it so it's hardly evolutionary.

Also, when did innovation and evolution become synonymous? Because last I heard the later was a by product of the former: one company innovates other follow, said inovation becomes standard fare and thus is then considered an evolution from the previous products which did not have the new feature. Admittedly some of these products were medioce or, as with the P5K3 Premium and its 2GB onboard DDR3, pretty much doomed to failure from the offset but who cares? Innovation doesn't mean success and next time around the product(s) may well be actually worth buying which is only good for the consumers who are interested and of no harm to those that don't - Asus will spend money of R & D regardless if you'd prefere a 50p cheaper product and no development.

As the article also says, other companies also produced innovative products (such as Intel's 45nm solution - High-K Metal Gate is an astounding bit of engineering if you fancy studying up on processor transistor tech enough to understand it fully) but none of them consistantly tried new things to the degree Asus has.

Oh, and of course there's the fact that Bit-tech is only able to offer you the quantity and quality of review content because manufacturers are willing to send products. It may not be of interest to you but sometimes it's nice to give a little something back to your benefactors, and that isn't the same thing as saying Bit gets lots of Asus stuff so they created an Asus award - it is not that kind of site and any other company would get the same praise if they offered the same level of inovation.

Good list guys, and I'm glad to say that I've got a few of those in my rig. The P182 is without a doubt the best case I've ever owned, and the G0 Q6600 is so overclockable I really don't understand why anyone would spend the cash on the higher end CPUs.

I do have a 680i mobo though, however I really can't complain about it's performance so far (I bet it's had a massive failure now and when I get home there'll be that acrid smell of the Magic Blue Smoke lingering in the air).

However I am completely gutted about the advent of the 8800GT as about 2 -3 months before it was released I shelled out on the 640MB 8800 GTS, which to be fair is an awesome card that's been running most things well at 1900x1200 and only Crysis has had issues with (but even 3x 8800GTX has issues with that game!).

It's a shame that AMD really suck right now though as for years I was an huge AMD fanboy, but performance talks and BS walks! . Although the 3870 looks like a really good value card for as little as £130!

while i am not exactly fond of the award listing endeavor... i think it is still worthy and useful as a guide to the general consumer.

Originally Posted by Archangel
Admittedly some of these products were medioce or, as with the P5K3 Premium and its 2GB onboard DDR3, pretty much doomed to failure from the offset but who cares?

that was a bad product, but gutsy indeed. When i first heard of the product, i thought they should have...

[1] 4GB onboard,

[2] wait for a better IC to be reachable 1600. Below 1600MHz, the product window of profitability fairly short 9-12 months max, and make no sense beyond that. Onboard RAM ICs are generally superior in signal characteristics and can be highly optimized, thus should be overclockable to 1800MHz++.

[3] licence RAM-DISK based system either in software/driver form or on-chip solution that is capable of turning 128-1GB DDR1600 as a buffer for SATA-IO. Thus giving 32bit users something to do with wasted (approx.) 1GB.

through my work with many motherboard companies and their manufacturing facilities in greater china, (IMHO) ASUS has some of the strongest R&D + engineering teams in the consumer products segment, partly because of their size. They got economies of scale on purchasing of ICs and Connectors (2 most expensive parts on mobos) for both their own products and contract manufacturing deals.

ASUS can afford to take risks, and i agree they are most innovative in that sense.

Originally Posted by Whalemeister
It's a shame that AMD really suck right now though as for years I was an huge AMD fanboy, but performance talks and BS walks! . Although the 3870 looks like a really good value card for as little as £130!

yeah, bummer ain't it. they made mistakes in changing sockets, paid too much for ATI (A very Merry Christmas to ATI shareholders), screwing retail channels, and poor implementation on fab+manufacturing.

AM2+ chipset + AMD CPU is not enticing enough for me anyway because it's halfway to the stakehouse. AM3 chipset is just around the corner. I think AMD has interesting products coming in later 08.

Great round up, great list to anyone wanting to build a PC.

But what about monitors? Surely '07 was the year of the widescreen integration into every home pc! Or was that just me catching up? :D

Plz make best Monitor of the year.....

and 1 more make plz about productivity of 2X 8800 GT sli in crysis