by Anna Filatova
01/09/2004 | 01:37 PM
Well, now that we have said good-bye to the year 2003, we are ready to sum up the results of the poll we have had on our site in the end of the year. Let’s find out what companies you, our readers, considered the best in their field in the past year.
<%BANNER[article]%>The poll has been up on X-bit labs site for one and a half months. More than 10,000 people took part in this poll. Basing on the opinion expressed by our readers we decided to give 9 awards to the winners of this poll. Please, meet the winners now!
Here our readers chose AMD Company, which made a revolution in the processor market in 2003 and introduced its own 64bit Athlon 64 processors for desktop systems and 64-bit Opteron processors for servers. This was the determinative for more than 2/3 of our readers and they called AMD the best CPU maker of the year 2003.
Mainboards from ASUS enjoy the reputation of high-performance, high-quality and stable products. That is why the title of the best mainboard maker of the past year 2003 has been awarded to ASUS, which appeared almost twice as popular among our readers as its competitors.
Sound cards and sound processors from Creative Labs remain the standard of high-quality audio for PCs. Therefore, in this nomination our Reader’s choice has been awarded exactly to Creative Labs Company, which received almost two thirds of votes.
Shuttle Company, which was the first to start the production of mini-systems in the “cubic” form-factor is an indisputable leader in the SFF market. More than 50% of our readers were unanimous and awarded Shuttle with the title of the best SFF systems maker of the year 2003.
Our poll showed that our readers cannot decide that easily which company deserves being called the best in the chipset market. The gap between the poll leaders, Intel and NVIDIA, is only 3%. However, nevertheless, the award has been given to NVIDIA, which has been supporting AMD with its chipset throughout the entire year 2003.
Our readers decided that the best maker of overclocking-friendly memory modules in the past year is Corsair Company. These modules boast high production quality and excellent functional parameters. Half of all our poll participants gave their votes for this particular manufacturer that is why Corsair managed to leave its closest competitor more than twice behind.
In the graphics processor market our readers appeared surprisingly unanimous. The indisputable leader here is ATI Company, which managed to win with a huge advantage. This company released the whole family of very successful solutions based on RADEON 9700 PRO architecture last year and definitely deserved this honor.
The best graphics card maker of the past year again appeared ATI Company, as our readers decided. Besides the graphics chips, the company also offers us graphics cards based on them. More than 25% of the poll participants voted for ATI to be called the best VGA card maker of the past year.
Our readers called Western Digital the best manufacturer of hard disk drives in the past year. More than 40% of our readers think so. Really, in 2003 Western Digital released a lot of new IDE drive models, which have significantly raised the performance level of the mainstream HDDs.
