The bit-tech and CPC Awards 2009

Back in August we announced our all new, combined Custom PC and bit-tech awards. While we get plenty of chances to test the latest hardware and games each month, we don’t often get to experience buying, using and maintaining the products as paying customers and so we decided to make the majority of our awards reader voted.

We moved away from giving awards to individual products and decided instead to focus on companies, reasoning that focussing on specific products would fragment people's verdicts, and make the likelihood of a convincing, reliably calculated winner in each category rarer. Asking about companies would also allow the awards voting to more easily factor in tangential, but still important considerations, such as pre- and post-sales support, quality of the manufacturer's website and how people feel about a firm's overall approach to the market. These types of considerations are important, but are difficult for us to factor into product reviews as they focus on a specific piece of kit.

Voting for companies also meant we could create an award to recognise the importance of Modding to both bit-tech and CPC, a category for retailers and one focussing on overclocking.

With the categories decided, we opened a survey and ran it on the site. Over two months, nearly four and a half thousand readers voted for their favourite hardware firms, retailers and game developers.


There were eleven awards voted for by you, the readers:

• Best Motherboard Manufacturer
  
• Best Graphics Manufacturer
  
• Best Memory Manufacturer
  
• Best PSU Manufacturer
  
• Best Chassis Manufacturer
  
• Best PC & Laptop Manufacturer
  
• Best Retailer
  
• Overclocking & Cooling Award
  
• Best Modding Manufacturer
  
• Best PC Game Developer
  
• Best RMA & Service Award

There were also an additional three awards voted for by us, the editorial teams of bit-tech and CPC:

• Dream PC Award. Every year we challenge the world's leading professional PC builders to craft the most technologically advanced, innovative, eye-catching PCs they can. This award is given to the winner of the Dream PCs labs test.
  
• Technical Innovation Award. This is an award which recognises innovative thinking, interesting ideas and radical design – elements that really move PC technology forward.
  
• Elite Hardware Award. This award is simple and straightforward – it goes to the most desirable piece of hardware we’ve seen, the bit of kit that we’d be happiest taking home.

We held an awards evening in central London last month to hand out the awards, an event that was generously sponsored by Sapphire. Only one winner was revealed beforehand – the Dream PC award. It went to Scan for a third year running, thanks to its efforts with the astounding Jellyfish.

With only one award known before the night started, the atmosphere was tense as bit-tech editor Tim and CPC editor Alex took the stage to announce the winners...