The Best of Bit-tech 2009

Hardware

This year may have disappointed some when it came to big gaming releases, but there’s still been lots of exciting stuff happening on the hardware side, thanks to new pushes in Nvidia PhysX, 3D gaming and DirectX 11.

As always, we’ve made a big effort to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to writing hardware content, and we haven’t just limited ourselves to fuelling the competition between Nvidia and ATI. We’ve also spent a lot of time looking at technology which will be interesting to modders and early adopters; SSDs, DDR3 RAM, Linux-powered media players, net-tops and more.

It’s also worth noting that we held a combined bit-tech and Custom PC award ceremony this year, with gongs going out to many of the best hardware companies, retailers and developers. Most of the awards were voted for by readers, and the awards included the coveted Dream PC award, so check out the summary for more info and embarrassing pictures from the night.

Hardware Reviews

• Intel Core i7 Mobile 720QM Benchmarks
  
• Samsung Spinpoint F3 Review
  
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 Architecture Analysis
  
• Titan Fenrir Cooler Review
  
• OCZ Vertex SSD Review
  
• Inside the £1,000 Asus Mars
  
• Intel Lynnfield Architecture Details
  
• SSD Performance Tweaks For Vista
  
• Radeon HD 4890 vs. Geforce GTX 275
  
• Intel Xeon W5580 Nehalem EP CPU Review
  
• Antec Nine Hundred Two Case Review
  
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 295 Quad SLI
  
• What’s The Best 120mm Case Fan?
  
• ATI CrossFire on Radeon HD 5000-series Tested
  
• LGA1366 CPU Cooler Round-Up
  
• Nvidia’s Ion Platform
  
• Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB Review
  
• Razer Mamba Gaming Mouse Review
  
• Sony Vaio P-Series Netbook Review
  
• ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB Review
  
• Etymotic hF2 Custom Fit Earphones
  
• Asus OC Station Review
  
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Review
  
• Computex Review

Dream PCs

• Scan’s Jellyfish
  
• Kobalt’s Daedalus
  
• Cryo PC’s Graphite
  
• Chillblast’s Fusion
  
• Beast's Cerberus

Scan was the winner of the prestigious Custom PC and bit-tech Dream PC award, though the competition was very fierce this year. Likewise, there was a huge amount of competition between the bit-tech team to see who could write the most blog entries over the course of a year - check the next page to see who won.