The bit-tech and Custom PC Awards 2009

Best PC Game Developer: Valve

Nominees: BioWare * Relic * Ubisoft

You don’t have to look far to find negative stories about PC gaming, so with this award we wanted to celebrate the best in gaming on the best gaming machine going – and Valve blew away the opposition. Steam might have got off to a rocky start back in 2004, but it’s now a massively important part of gaming on the PC. As strong as Steam is, Valve hasn’t taken its eye off the ball when it comes to its actual games, and we were really impressed by Left 4 Dead2.

Best RMA & Service Award: Scan

Nominees: Amazon * Asus * Corsair * Ebuyer

Computers break. It’s just what they do, and that means it’s really important that a company handles returns and service well. In this category we allowed you to vote for hardware companies and retailers, as the job of supporting broken kit falls to both. Asus and Corsair were the only two hardware companies to pick up enough votes to make it into the top 5, but Scan came out top, making for a hat-trick of awards on the night.

Dream PC Award: Scan Jellyfish

Nominees: Beast Cerberus * Chillblast Fusion Artisan * Cryo PC Graphite * Kobalt Daedalus

Yes, the Jellyfish was bright orange - but if you were well heeled enough to buy one, you could change the colour - and to get hung up on the colour would mean overlooking the incredible attention to detail that characterises the machine and the insane number of hours required to craft a PC to that standard.

Technical Innovation Award: Intel, for the QPI interconnect

Nominees: Asus for GPU overvolting in SmartDoctor overclocking software * Microsoft for Windows 7 * Nvidia for 3D Vision * Valve for the AI Director in Left 4 Dead

Thanks to the economic crisis, 2009 has been a difficult year the computer hardware industry and there hasn't been an awful lot of innovation. We've seen Asus introduce its SmartDoctor overclocking software, which included Voltage Tweak technology for all of its graphics cards, Valve's AI Director in Left 4 Dead is worthy of a mention, as are the many innovations introduced with Windows 7 and DirectX 11 in particular.

However, the Technical Innovation award could only really go to Intel for its QPI interconnect, which enabled the Xeon 5500 series 'Nehalem EP' processors to deliver unprecedented performance increases over the previous generation. Without QPI, these improvements wouldn't be possible.

Elite Hardware Award: OCZ 120GB Vertex

Nominees: Asus P6TD Deluxe * ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 * HP LP2475w * Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition

Finally, the Elite Hardware award went to the OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD with an almost unanimous decision, proving that this year is the year of the SSD. Several of the team have opted to buy one of more of OCZ's excellent Vertex drives for their own systems so it was a natural choice. It saw off competition from the other nominations Intel's Core i7-975, the awesome Asus P6TD Deluxe, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and the HP LP2475w 24in monitor.


All that remains to say is thank you to everyone who voted - we had a great response, and we're happy that we were able to give awards on the basis of the choices made by the most discerning and knowledgeable PC enthusiasts we know. Thanks again to Sapphire for sponsoring the do. Happy with the winners? Think someone was overlooked? Not enough comedy pictures of Harry for your liking? Let us know in the forums!