Best Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Dell/Alienware — For the second year in a row Dell snags this award. However, this year we felt that Alienware deserved a nod too. Both have committed their companies to producing the top PCs on the market. Both have excellent reliability, construction, and technical support. More important is the overall quality of the components. Top parts are easy to order. I would still suggest strongly that Dell discontinues using the Aztech MDx series of modems as they are pieces of junk. Other then that little SNAFU I would easily recommend either to a friend/relative.
Worst Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Tiger Direct Systems — Can you say “garbage”? I knew you could. It’s funny that garbage and Tiger aren’t closer in the dictionary. They sure mean the same thing. Every Tiger Direct System comes with 16-bit wave table sound. That’s sort of like a pretend sound card. Worse yet, you get a whopping 4MB of video RAM. Nice. If you figure out which modem you have in the PC you’re luckier than most people. You’d have better luck buying a box and painting the word computer on it.
Best Commercial/Workstation Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Dell — Yes, two years running my nonlinear DV editing system/AV nonlinear system of choice is a Dell. Why? High end video card meets high end sound card meets lots of good stuff. Every component for every price range is suited for its role. From simple office applications to high end work stations you can’t beat the price or the components.
Worst Commercial/Work Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Compaq — Two years running Compaq has snagged this award. Why? Simply put, I have never seen a company pride itself on unreliable components. Yes, their bottom end machines come with PC Tel HSP modems. Yes, they are the worst modems on the market. Yes, the video RAM is completely shared and lacks the power for any 3D application out there. It’s kind of sad. Compaq recently put together a real good PC (Presario 5900Z), but for most consumers it’s too late. They have already found aforementioned greener pastures to buy in.
Best Processor Manufacturer: AMD (Thunderbird Athlon) — I know the Intel Pentium 4 is the fastest processor on the market, but can you get one? Maybe. Besides with twenty-some-odd step caching you really don’t see any true application performance beyond what you would expect. So that is why I chose the AMD Thunderbird as the better CPU. It offers real world performance, as well as, gaming performance that can’t be beat. What can I say? I’m biased.
Best Sound Card Manufacturer/Chipset: Creative Labs (Live 5.1! Platinum) — Creative Labs (mostly through buy outs) has conquered the sound card market. With the advent of their Live! 5.1 sound cards this year Creative has put itself in an excellent position to conquer not just gaming, but also DVD playback. This certainly would only further their excellent chip set and sound creation capabilities as they continue to expand their markets. One question: Where’s my professional musician workstation sound card? You guys need to go there!
Best Graphics Card Manufacturer/Chipset: ATI (Radeon) — If you told me a year ago I would name ATI as the best video card maker I would have laughed at you. A year ago they sucked bad. Their cards were archiac pieces of silicon. However, with the Radeon we finally saw a real video card that could not only touch, but possibly burn the mighty nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra chip set. The Radeon rules when it comes to large polygon fills. It has a wonderful graphics rendering engine and offers the very fast DDR SDRAM for memory (64MB of it!). Smoking.
Best Modem/Communication Manufacturer: US Robotics (Performance Pro Internal PCI) — We are about a half year into US Robotics being a self owned entity again. So far, so good. They have recently started production of a V.92 standard modem. We’ll see how that goes. For now though, the US Robotics Performance Pro owns the roost. It is hardware controlled and therefore very fast. Unless your line levels are horrid (read: sounds like underwater) you should be able to get a connection to your ISP.
Best Hard Drive Manufacturer/Series: IBM (Deskstar 75GXP) — With 75GB of storage space and one of the fatest access times around you can’t go wrong with a Deskstar. The spindle runs at 7,500RPM and works wonders in RAID 0 (striped=speed) configurations. You simply can’t get a faster large drive, but it will cost you a good penny. Performance like this isn’t cheap.
Coolest Innovation: TDK BURN-Proof — The VeloCD would be a cool CD-RW burner on its own. Couple the technology called BURN-Proof (it elminates something called buffer underrun errors that occur when you multi-task) and now you have a super kick ass CD-RW. BURN-Proof has had few competitors (Sanyo makes something similar), but TDK gets props for being the first. Thanks to BURN-Proof you can burn MP3s while playing Quake III. Thank you TDK!
Stupidest Innovation: The AMR Standard — I can picture it now: A bunch employees of a computer technology development company are standing around and one of the software programmers says, “Gee, I wonder if we can make software modems perform worse and cost less?”. The engineer to his left says, “Yeah! We could not only emulate all the modem functions in software to drag down system resources, but we could also halve the pin bandwidth and use an on board sound card to interpret the data!” The marketing guy says, “Sounds ineffective, cheap, and prone to errors. I’ll get right on the ad copy!”. Yes, AMR (stands for Audio Modem Riser) is a daughter board that hooks up to your motherboard in a small PCI-like slot. The slot has a DSP (digital signal processor) which interprets the modem’s data. It actually is a glorified sound card and it isn’t really that great of a sound card (think 16-bit sound “yuck”). Recently the AMR Standards Commission unveiled its next generation standard ACR (Audio Communications Riser) and it’s just repackaged crap. You’re be better off screaming out your window to your ISP.