Motherboard, Chipset and Memory
Best Motherboard Manufacturer of 2005
Motherboards are an item that gets overlooked many times by the extreme enthusiast until they realize they have to plug that ubber-CPU and GPU into something. There are a lot of strong contenders in the motherboard market today, but Asus seems to have left the best impression on our readers and takes home the award.
Talk about a close shave! Asus just barely edged out DFI for the best motherboard manufacturer of the 2005 award, and I mean barely. With Asus’ strong offerings in the A8N32-SLI Deluxe and DFI’s continued success with their LAN Party brand this should be an interesting category throughout 2006.
Our motherboard section at PC Perspective looks at a lot of great boards from all different manufacturers, so be sure to look it over.
Best Chipset of 2005
No motherboard will be worth very much without a great chipset sitting on top of it. And in that regard, NVIDIA had a big year as well. Their NF4 SLI X16 chipset takes home the win for best chipset of 2005.
The voting was pretty close here, but the only three contenders were all from NVIDIA and based on the AMD platform. The X16 chipset’s performance boost and pure enthusiast target are probably what gave it the boost to the top.
Our chipset and motherboard sections round up the information on the chipsets seen here as well as any future technologies.
Best Chipset Designer of 2005
To go along with the best chipset of 2005, NVIDIA has also been awarded the best chipset designer of 2005 award.
Again, not even close in the voting with ATI, VIA, Intel, ULi and SiS making up less than 20% of the total vote combined.
Best Memory Manufacturer of 2005
Memory modules are an item that many enthusiasts hold dear to their heart and some will tell you are the most important part of a fast and overclocking capable system. It turns out that Corsair has made the best impression on our readers with both high quality parts and prices that are very competitive in the market.
Corsair took home more than half to the total vote in our poll and left the second place OCZ brand well behind. Corsair’s memory has long been a favorite for PC Perspective’s test beds and it seems that our readers agree as well.
