KitGuru Annual Awards 2012

1. KitGuru Annual Awards 20122. CPU3. Graphics4. Solid State Drives5. Mainboards6. Chassis7. Power Supply Units8. Cooling Technology9. Memory10. Storage11. Gaming and Accessories12. Best of the Rest13. Conclusion14. View All Pages

2012 was a busy year for the Kitguru team. We reviewed hundreds of products in the last twelve months, from mainsteam performance memory cards to bank breaking video cards. Today we look back on the last 12 months and pick out the very best hardware to hit our labs.

Having posted close to 7,000 articles since we launched, it might come as a surprise that only a handful of products have ever achieved top marks in the KitGuru Labs. In fact, it took five months of testing to get the first product with a perfect '10' and that was Arctic's MX-4 Thermal Compound. Since then, only a couple of products have managed to score the perfect 10.

For the KitGuru annual awards, getting a great score on a product when it was first reviewed will only go part of the way to securing top spot for the whole year. We will also take into account other products which might have superseded it – maybe with a slightly lower score, but a significantly lower price.

A great example of this was the launch of nVidia's GTX660. Each new card into the KitGuru Lab had an even more impressive cooler/overclock than the previous one – so the lead was being swapped every other day.

In some cases, we have two clear winners: For example, there's no intelligent way to match a high performance Intel chipset board with one designed for an entry level AMD APU, so we've created intelligent sub-categories or sections.

Another thing to note is that, in some cases, the winning product is in KitGuru's Labs – fully tested – but hasn't been published yet. It's rare, but does happen, so we'll let you know when you're getting an ‘insight into the future'.

One thing is for sure, whatever your preferences: If you build a system based on these components – you can't go wrong. For that reason, we've created a brand new award logo for these special products – something worth looking out for!

Enough pre-amble, let's get on with the KitGuru Annual Awards 2012.

CPU
We start with processors, the heart of the modern system. Pricing has now been compressed so much that it doesn't make sense to split hairs. What do we mean by ‘compressed'?  Well the APU chips from AMD can cost you £100 and Intel fastest ‘mainstream' chip, the 3770k, is just over £240.

Intel and AMD's line-ups have both been considered and here's what we think is the best of each.

Intel
While the Core i7 3770k is a killer product and the new Extreme chips are, well, extremely good – we've chosen the workhorse processor for most enthusiast systems: Intel Core i5 3570k. It's an amazingly flexible chip and very simple to clock around 4.5GHz – while those with advanced knowledge of voltage regulation can get a lot closer to 5GHz.

AMD
It's generally acknowledged that AMD won't compete at the very high end in the future, especially in light of the Q3 analyst's call.
As the market moves toward more economical solutions and lower power consumption requirements, the product of the year for AMD becomes clear, it's the chip that will provide the baseline environment for both the next XBox and PlayStation: AMD A10 5800k.

You can go with the slightly cheaper 5600k (and companies like Medion using a 5700 for pre-built systems), but the small increase in price gets you almost 50% more graphics processing (384 vs 256 units), which we feel is worth the difference.

There is a 3rd solution that we want to recognise in this section as well – and that is for something that is squarely aimed at serious professional users. In October, KitGuru Labs had to make way for a pair of Intel Xeon E5 2687W processors. Writing 29 pages of in-depth analysis is, as you would expect, really hard work – but with these £1,500 a piece processors, the devil was in the details.

The results we achieved in Cinebench 11.5 were simply staggering. The bottom of the KitGuru scale for this test is occupied by Intel's 2500k processor, which scored a respectable 5.38. Take a Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition and clock it all the way to 4.8GHz and you score 14.1, which is pretty tasty. The dual Xeon configuration managed a stonking 25.41!

The score was so large, that it forced a resizing of our previous graphs – with almost every chip in the market now occupying the left half of the chart with the Xeons, over on the right edge, in a class of their own. For that reason, we're confirming the Dual Intel Xeon E5 2687W Processor Solution one of our products of the year.

Graphics
Whenever KitGuru runs a poll on which upgrade our readers spend the most time considering, the winner is invariably graphics.

To this date, apart from SSD, there's almost nothing else you can do with your system to increase measurable performance than boosting your graphics grunt.

Given that a KitGuru reader might spend anywhere from £75 to £1,000, we've decided to appoint 2 winners per group.

One for ‘Makes your heart beat faster' dream cards and the second for cards that will ‘make anyone's life better'.

nVidia
Definitely an area where you want to consider letting your heart rule your head, if you can afford it. While the GTX660 has been phenomenally successful, the turbo-charged 4GB version of the GTX670 from Asus really pumped our nads at the high end – beating many dual GPU solutions in the process. So the winner of our inaugural nVidia graphics product of the year award is the phenomenal Asus GTX670 Direct CU II.

In the mainstream, closer to £200, there are few cards that can stand against the Gigabyte GTX660 Ti Windforce. Once it established itself on the KitGuru performance charts, many a competitor tried to drag it down – but none succeeded.

AMD
You can stack all the Bumblebees you want in a pile (and augment them with All-Sparks etc), but surely you'll never topple Sapphire's very own Megatronic warrior: The 6GB 7970 Toxic.  It's an absolute monster and an engineering tour de force. In Crossfire it comfortably beats the Asus GTX690 and VTX 7990 cards in our last graphics group test of 2012. It's not cheap, hard to find and it might make the lights in your home flicker, but it crushes the latest games like paper cups.  Sure, you'll need to sell your car, but who cares about driving anyway, right?

For the mass market, the Tahiti LE version of AMD's 7870 arrived in December. It brought with it 7950 levels of performance – but was priced down closer to £180. That's hard to ignore. For pioneering this kind of affordable power, the winner is the VTX3D HD7870 Black.

Solid State Drives
Without doubt, this has been our (internal) favourite upgrade for some time now.

Sure, putting a brand new £200 graphics card into a 2 year old machine is going to help make your games fly, but it's not an overall sense of wonder – just a specific boost in a specific set of applications.

The reason SSD technology is so fascinating and exciting, is that it takes all of the hardware you already owned – then ‘gives it back to you' with a completely different user experience.
The CPU you thought might be too slow, is suddenly fast enough and your frustration levels drop significantly.
In short, upgrading to a good SSD will actually make you smile.

Before we get to the actual winning units, we want to make a special mention of the OCZ R4 Z-Drives demonstrated to us at CeBIT last March. Seeing a system spend all day long moving a DVD's worth of data back and forth, between a pair of Solid State Drives, in under 2 seconds was very impressive and, probably, a glimpse into the future.

For this category, we've chosen our overall performance favourite and a value option that will make your life better without breaking the bank. The same company is responsible for both and while OCZ has had plenty of drama behind the scenes in 2012, you can't ignore the company's ability to deliver market-leading product.

SSD Peak Performance
Choosing this winner is pure science. You can beat the scores using RAID arrays, but in a straight head-2-head fight, the winner is the 256GB OCZ Vector. While OCZ's own Octane drives can take up to 20 seconds to load STALKER, the Vector manages it in just 15 seconds. All that power is available for less than £200 at the end of 2012.

SSD Value Option
With most traditional hard drives now under £100 online, our SSD Value choice needs to be under that figure. At the same time, space is important and we believe that you need at least 120GB to make this exercise worthwhile. On that basis, the strongest contender has to be the 240GB OCZ Vertex 2 drive that hit the shelves at just £88 for Christmas. Every other product in this report was released in 2012, but the price drop on the Vertex 2 (from over £500 at launch to under £90 today) is so strong, that it's as if a new product has been launched.

Mainboard
The underlying technology that makes all other things possible, the base upon which all dreams are built – so ‘no pressure' then.
We need to say, at this stage, that bad boards don't really exist any more.

Sure, some can be over priced and we've managed to lose days in the lab when a vendor decides to completely overhaul their BIOS when we're almost done testing – but the latest chipsets from Intel and AMD are both feature-full and stable.

That said, some are a dream to work with, while others are still 1 or 2 generations back in terms of software (UEFI) and support.

Given that you can be building a system for pure performance or with a specific budget in mind – and you might be choosing Intel or AMD – we have covered all four of those options: Value & Performance for Intel & AMD.

AMD Value
While recent success has been focused around graphic cards, sporting the Twin Frozr cooling solution, MSI still knows how to compete in the fierce mainboard market. Arguably one of the better specifications being offered in this sector of the market is the MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 which seems to offer an extensive feature set around the £48 mark. It's hard to understand why AMD doesn't use these for all its APR-sampling instead of sending mega boards costing more than the APU itself. No overall winner here, but we're expecting big things from FM2 boards in 2013.

AMD Performance
There might be cheaper options if you want a simple Bulldozer set-up, but for anyone who's interested in pushing their O/C skills to the max, then the Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2 is a great choice around the £130 mark. Even though you have to turn off most of the cores in the FX-8150 – some of the world's top overclockers have managed more than 8.5GHz with AMD. That's WAY past a 100% overclock, which is traditionally considered the ‘point at which things start to get very serious.

Intel Value
Sometimes we feel like the technology market is too close to the financial market – the price of products goes up and down so much. At the time we put the Gigabyte Z77-D3H through the Kitguru Labs torture testing, it was close to £80. After picking up out top award, pricing drifted up, but – fortunately – it's now down closer to £75. However you look at it, the Z77-D3H is a killer product. If you have £30 more in your budget, then MSI has an excellent Z77 mainboard for your consideration. When we put the MSI Z77A-G45 board through its paces, we concluded that it could overclock with the best of them – even past £200. It clocked a 3770k to 4.8GHz only the smallest of BIOS adjustments and it also supports memory through to 2,666MHz – giving you plenty of bandwidth for demanding applications. So we declare these two board as our Intel Value selections for 2012.

Intel Performance
At the top end of the performance spectrum, the quality available is incredible. Having considered all the options, we have a tie between the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion and the Asus Rampage IV Extreme, so they share the Intel Performance award.

Chassis

While having very little to do with day-to-day performance in many situations, there's a definite feel-good factor to getting the right case.

Also, if you decide to upgrade or clock the nuts off your rig, then additional space and clean airflow will certainly make a difference.
KitGuru has pushed hard on acoustic testing and this is something very dear to our hearts: A case may look stunning and perform well, but if we become conscious of its noise output – then it's not going to get far in the KitGuru Lab.

Without doubt, if money was absolutely no object, then the Lian-Li PC X-2000FN is absolutely stunning, without flaw and convinced us to write 10 pages of detailed analysis. It scored a perfect 10. But the price tag of £400 can't be ignored and very few people can afford such luxury. On that basis, we've decided to be much more realistic with regards to pricing for our ATX choice for 2012.

Very stiff competition has produced a winner in each of 3 price bands.

For those on a strict budget, the Antec Three Hundred Two has a great many things in its favour – especially the £46 price tag. If you want to build a new rig into a sensible chassis – on a budget – then this is our choice for 2012.

On the other hand, if we put functionality to the fore, then the BitFenix Shinobi XL edges out the competition by offering superb upgradeability at just over £100. Don't let the price fool you, it has space for multiple 360mm radiators and the top of the case has 4 USB 3 ports and a supercharger. It's not metal, which will stand against it with some system builders, but we suggest you read the review carefully before choosing anything else.

When it comes to an overall winner however, there can be only one choice this year for us. The Cooler Master Cosmos II, which we love. This case is fully loaded and scored a jaw dropping 9.5 out of 10 when we reviewed it back in January 2012.

Power Supplies

Power supplies have grown to keep pace with the high increase in demand for wattage from gamers, enthusiasts and professional overclockers. The movement from 200w supplies in the mid-1990s all the way through to every supplier offering 1kw and beyond, happened in less than a decade.

.These days, there is a much greater emphasis on efficiency – for every component in your system.

For the mass-market, that drive for efficiency has also driven down the need for huge power supplies. Even a good quality 500w PSU can power many high end single GPU rigs, but you dare not approach Tri-SLi or a pair of 6GB Sapphire 7970 6GB Toxic cards without a solid, stable, high-capacity power supply in the PC.

For the KitGuru Annual Awards 2012, we have decided to define 3 distinct areas for consideration: Value, Performance and Technical Excellence.

Value
Choosing a PSU when you want to build a new system within a fixed budget, means balancing every £1 between the key components. Putting £20 more into your PSU could mean reducing your system memory by 50% – or choosing an entry level cooler instead of the beast you need for more stable overclocks.

For that reason, we looked past the amazing Seasonic G Series 550w and the great Dark Power Pro P10 from BeQuiet, simply on price. They're fine for a mid-price system, but at the low end you know that there will only be 1 graphic card and sensible overclocking.

On that basis, we have chosen the BeQuiet! Pure Power L8 430W CM. In testing we built an Intel Core i7 3770k system with this power supply, clocking it to 4.5GHz and combining it with a Radeon 7870 for prolonged stress testing and there was no issue at all.

Performance
You're a serious user with multiple high-end graphic cards and an urge to clock everything nice and high. At the same time, you can't afford any variance in supply. We tested several supplies that match this kind of criteria in 2012. The Corsair Professional Series AX1200i is one of those supplies, but it just loses on price to the 1,250w Seasonic X-Series unit which delivers similar performance.

Our conclusion included ‘zero' negative points for the X-Series, but the following positives: Quiet, Immensely powerful, fabulous appearance, very efficient, fully modular, rock solid and 8 PCI-E 6+2 cables for ultimate Crossfire and SLI system builds. Hard to argue with that.

Technical Excellence
In a year of relatively little innovation on the CPU front, the power supply companies appeared to go to war with features, advantages and benefits. Gold standard supplies reached new lows in terms of price point, while Corsair included more intelligence than ever into the AX1200i.

But, for us, the coolest release was the Platinum Fanless 520w from Seasonic. In our extensive testing, this power supply was happy to deliver up to 640 watts – without the need for a single fan.  Not only that, but the passively cooled unit is guaranteed to carry on supplying that silent juice for 7 years. Impressive stuff.

Cooling Technology

All of this passive cooling talk with power supplies has whet our appetite for CPU and system cooling. Every electrical component in your system leaks juice. If you want to go faster, then it's something you have to accept – that leakage increases to the point where it will defeat your attempts to push your hardware further.

Improved heat dissipation can cost you anywhere from £15 for a simple CPU cooler, through to thousands of pounds for a climate controlled room for your system or a liquid nitrogen rig where your processors may not last the day.

At KitGuru, we're all about the real world usage scenarios.

We reckon the market for cooling divides into 2 simple groups: Value and Performance. In both cases, it has to be for a solution that will (a) last and (b) not seriously degrade the life span of your key components. It also needs to be relatively straightforward to install and use – so we're not going to look at the non-sealed options.

Value
Very tough. To be honest, the Arctic Freezer range is very hard to beat, but most of those coolers were released over the past 3 years. We're looking for something new from 2012 and ‘new' is certainly what BeQuiet delivered with its innovative approach to low profile cooling for CPUs clocked anywhere up to 160 watts.

We had no expectations when this £30 cooler arrived, so we were pleasantly surprised when it held its own against the Phanteks PH-TC14PE on a 3770k chip clocked up to 4.7GHz. Under serious overclocking load, it allowed the CPU to get 5 degrees hotter, but with a regular overclock the difference was only 1 degree. Impressive. For us, the Value Cooler of the Year winner is the Be quiet! Shadow Rock TOPFLOW SR1.

Performance
Strangely enough, the manufacturers arbEqUIETe double parked around this award. Not only did Corsair deliver some fancy updates to its liquid cooling solutions, we also saw the Thermaltake Frio Extreme beat the Noctua NH D14. Unfortunately, its performance is almost identical to the Phanteks PH-TC14PE, which is £11 cheaper at the time we went to press. BeQuiet's Dark Rock 2 is also a great cooler, but at close to £50 it is in the wrong price space for its performance. Phanteks seems to have come out of nowhere to mount a very serious challenge at the high end. Our High Performance Air Cooler of the Year goes to the Phanteks PH-TC14PE.

Right at the close of the year, we reviewed the complete range of new Corsair liquid coolers. The H100i, H80i, H60 and H55. Factoring in cooling performance and value for money, we have to award both the Corsair H100i and the Corsair H80i as our Water Cooling products of the year. The icing on the cake is that they don't take much space around the CPU socket either, so fitting problems are never a concern – and if you have to move/transport your system, there's far less sheering force on the board and socket.

Memory

Wow, what a year it's been for memory companies. Demand for gigabytes has never been higher, while at the same time the price-per-GB has never been lower. Overall, that means that module manufacturers need to work harder and harder for less profit. Tough in any economy – but when things are flat, cashflow is a pain.

Companies that can innovate and drive forth in that kind of environment deserve respect.

Highlights included the Kingston's major assault on the performance and enthusiast sectors – which saw the year end with the launch of the 8GB Beast kit. G.Skill brought its strong relationships with the gamer/OC communities to various events – clocking TridentX memory to 3,900MHz with Christian Ney on a Gigabyte GA-A75-UD4H AMD chipset mainboard.

Even the second biggest memory module maker in the world, ADATA, got in on the act with redesigned and rebranded units aimed at the overclocking community (as well as a clever wireless access system for SD cards).

Geil's renewed drive into the market couples its existing memory brands like EVO with Epic Gear for gamers and Zenith SSD drives. And let's not forget the company that defined the performance memory category with TwinX and Dominator – Corsair has not been resting on its laurels.

As with other groups, we considered two market requirements for memory: Value for people that want to build a great system on a budget and Performance for those us who are, let's face it, a little crazy.

Value
Even before we begin judging the actual products themselves, we first had to decide what ‘Value' meant in 2012.

There was a time when memory was £20 a GB. Then for ages it was £10 and, today, you can buy a pair of Kingston 1GB Blu sticks for a little over £10. For us, ‘value' means a set up that will do everything you need – without borrowing money from another part of the system. On that basis, we're going to consider dual module kits, with a minimum of 8GB, that cost under £50 for this award.

Straight out of the box, the Kingston HyperX Predator Beast 8GB kits are very impressive and the 2400MHz modules weigh in around £40, which is impressive considering they can be clocked past 2,500MHz without adjusting the 1.65v.

In comparison, the Patriot Intel Extreme Masters 8GB kit runs at 2133MHz out of the packet and, although it packs some serious overclocking performance, the £50 asking price is less competitive. The same is true for the G.Skill TridentX Series 8GB 2400MHz kit up near £60. For us, the winner has to be the 2400MHz 8GB Kingston HyperX Predator Beast.

Performance
We did like AData's XPG Xtreme Series 2,133MHz 16GB kit – which clocks to 2,448MHz but costs around £140. We also love the 16GB Evo Leggera 1866MHz kit from Geil, which can be tuned to work comfortably past 2,100 MHz and only costs only £79. Patriot has great kits, designed in conjunction with Intel to celebrate the Extreme Masters tournaments – well worth considering in both 8GB and 16GB kit form.

At the very high end, our two favourite performance kits of 2012, are the budget priced Samsung Green DDR3 1,600mhz kit which could be overclocked to 2,400mhz+ and the Corsair Dominator Platinum 2,666mhz 16GB kit which ships at 2,666MHz and which we managed to clock to an incredible 2,849MHz. If you have deep pockets and want the ultimate memory for your system then the Corsair Dominator Platinum 2,666mhz memory is the best you can buy and it takes our Performance Memory Product of the Year award for 2012.

Storage

As the 3TB hard drives drop towards £90 for normal folks like us, the price of the 4TB – presently at £159 – will soon follow it down. Combine that with a society that thinks HD video is the standard way to capture moving images and multi-mega-bit internet should be almost free – and you have a recipe for disaster.

Why so gloomy?

Simple.

Hardly any of us do enough work on back-ups. But don't worry, the NAS brigade are here to help!

We could also include standard external drives into this category, alongside large capacity USB sticks and whopping SD cards, but the world is too interconnected – so we're going to stay on track with clever storage that can be addressed across a network, by multiple systems/people.

We've decided to give two awards in this category. One for serious solutions that we'll call business-class, but it could be any serious data creator/storer – and the second for every day use at home or in a small office.

Business Class
Without having a specific price limit in mind, there is an array of powerful options in the sub £3,000 space. While companies like Buffalo might do well in the entry level space, its high end efforts like the TeraStation Pro 8 run on slow Atom processors and come with fixed storage at 8, 16 and 24TB. Not good.

QNAP has a much better reputation in this space and products like the QNAP TS-879U-RP-E10G show why. But the really good stuff seems to happen just the wrong side of £3k.  That brings us to Netgear, a company that has the £1-6k market peppered with offers. But it's hard to ignore the volume of complaints we received about Netgear's other products recently. Sure, many companies will produce offers at at a variety of different price points – but while the increased revenue might be attractive – if you don't create the right feeling of support to a larger audience, then that can impact your overall image.

Which brings us to the Synology RackStation RS3412RPxs. It's built to survive a small nuclear explosion, can take 40TB of storage in the standard unit – with a 136TB limit if you add on RX1211/RX1211RP expansion units. In tests, we managed to comfortably beat 500MB/sec on data transfer around the network – and there's an upgrade available which could almost double that rate. Most impressive if that this unit is now down to just over £2,500. For us, it's an easy win.

Home/Small Office
Again, very hotly contested. With so many options available, we've decided to focus on offers that manage to hit under the £250 mark. That brings not only companies like Thecus into the mix, but also the hard drive manufacturer's own solutions – like the Western Digital My Book series.

One of the KitGuru news team has a 4TB Western Digital unit on his office network and loves the way it provides a safety net for every system – PC and Mac – on the network with its scheduled evening service. That said, he may have been lucky as the majority of customer reviews we've seen speak about a variety of issues – including a hands-off approach from the manufacturer's support team. Reputation is everything in this world – and nowhere is that more important than with your precious data.

Qnap products, like the TS-219P are also very impressive and performed well in our testing. That said, at just over £200 the Synology DS213 Air provides not only a great traditional NAS storage solution – but it also provides wireless capability, allowing you to set up Cloud Station for simple synchronisation with a multitude of devices in your home/workplace. Just add a pair of 4TB drives for a serious back up and streaming solution.

Gaming and Accessories

With thousands of man-hours spent testing the CPUs, GPUs, cooling solutions and storage – it's sometimes easy to lose track on why many of buy this stuff: To get online and frag the arse off enemies foreign and domestic.

Having been through a lot of products, we're going to give one award to each of the major components that you need to be in physical contact with in order to win: Keyboard. Mouse, Screen and Audio.

Keyboard
This year saw some valiant attempts in the keyboard arena from companies as diverse as Cooler Master, Xebec and the usual suspects like Microsoft and Logitech. Even though we got our hands on some of the latest units from Razer Black Widow Ultimate and the Roccat Isku as well, the one that stood out the most in 2012 was the Corsair Vengeance K90 keyboard with Cherry MX Red switches (like ‘black' but with lower actuation pressure).

Although specifically marketed as an MMO keyboard, it works well in all conditions and we love a clicky response here at KitGuru Labs.

Mice
There are specialist mice, but as soon as you set up for an RPG, you have complaints from the FPS brigade screaming that a vital head shot was missed because a minor button was accidentally pressed. Having worked our palms around a huge number of these devices, one product stood out (once the manufacture worked on a solution to a minor issue on the initial units shipped).

Originating in Hamburg, Germany, Roccat has managed to put a tremendous amount of pressure on Razer over the past 5 years and the Electronic Sports League (ESL – 4 million registered users) is now delivered in partnership with Roccat. Once we got to grips with the Roccat Kone XTD 8200 mouse, it was clear why this had been appointed ‘flagship' status by the Germans. Very impressive.

Screen
Here, we look for a balance of crisp gaming and professional-level colour reproduction – without taking the piss on price. It wasn't long ago when a serious monitor could set you back several hundred pounds. These days, you can get some very impressive products under the £300 mark.

If money is no object, then we'd all go for 30″ cinematic panels for £1k, but at the price point we're considering, we wanted certain tick boxes checked. Can we get an IPS panel, that's at least 24″, with proper colour calibration, that's set up near-perfect straight from the box, with a strong contrast ratio and fast response?

At £279, the Asus PA248Q delivers on all of those criteria. It's also built like a tank, with tilt, swivel, pivot and height adjustments to make your experience as perfect as you can get for this kind of money.

Audio
Some will prefer headphones, while others go for speakers. At KitGuru, we prefer the idea of speakers being part of your AV set-up, while your PC is more normally used with a headset – either for Skype calls, team talk or music etc – so that's where we're going to focus.

The Chao Dracco unit we had in from Thermaltake was certainly the brightest of the year. Not in terms of audio, but you have to say that a yellow/white/gold unit is unlikely to be lost on the average gamer's desktop.

Cooler Master's gaming brand, Storm, unloaded the Ceres 400, which was judged to be ‘ok', and the Sonuz at £50 which was a lot better. We tested them on someone with really big ears (without explaining the nature of the test) and they declared them ‘Very comfortable', which was good.

So we come to top spot. Tough one.

With the Asus Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand pushing through the Vulcan ANC headset into exactly the same space as the Storm Sonuz, there is a lot of competition around the £50 mark. But the benefits of moving closer to £100 are all too apparent.

Bear in mind that even at £100, you are still toward the low end of ‘serious headphones'. If your budget can stretch to the £100 mark, then the SteelSeries Fnatic 7H and Asus ROG Vulcan Pro come head to head. For pure gaming, the SteelSeries unit is a very attractive deal, but – in overall use by the enthusiast sector – the additional electronics that Asus has put into the built in soundcard take its headset into a different area and the active noise cancelling really works. Our choice in this category is the Asus ROG Vulcan Pro.

Best of the Rest

Having covered all of the most popular categories, we wanted to take a step back – consider every other product that has graced the KitGuru Labs in 2012 – and pick our favourite.

Notable mentions in this category go to products like the Nexus 7 that Asus manufactured on behalf of Google. Solid build quality, alongside a very attractive £159 launch price showed just how much competition Apple can expect in 2013. Having mentioned the big boys themselves, KitGuru is happy to confess an iPad addiction, but we've yet to be won over by the iPhone. Roll on the 5s.

For those into photography, we got excellent results from AData's Premier Pro UHS-I U1 SD cards and even the ultra-fast 32GB version is only £25. If you're into gaming and want to capture everything in real time and full HD, then the AverMedia game Capture HD is interesting, albeit £100.

As Intel began to push its 4″x4″ systems for 2013, Sapphire stepped up its game with the Edge VS8 – featuring an A8 APU – but it definitely needs a solid state drive to reach its potential.

Touching again on Asus, it really pushed out the boat this year to show it can master more than one market. Its next generation RT-AC66U wireless router managed to offer 876Mbps in the same room and even when we moved 15 metres away (with 3 walls in between), it was still peaking up near 400Mbps. It costs £190 now, but that kind of spec will become much more affordable going forward.

We saw some very encouraging signs from local system builders like PC Specialist, Aria, Dino PC, OcUK and MESH. Winning in 2013 is something that will require a huge effort in the face of not only massive competition from multi-billion dollar competitors like HP and Dell – but a listless economy and move toward tablet systems.

We also cracked a big smile when we saw professional guitar amplifier company, Orange, deliver a fully featured PC to KitGuru Labs that had been modded into one of its amp units. Very impressive.

Lastly, just before we reveal our ‘Best of the Rest' award, we'd like to send words of encouragement to companies that push style forward. We've got Thermaltake's BMW designed Tt eSports Level 10M mouse. It might be heavy and expensive, but it really does look different and comes in a range of colours.

For the ‘Best of the Rest' in 2012, we're going to recognise two products, one hardware and the other software.

While more famously known for its performance memory and SSD product, Patriot provided an interesting and refreshing surprise to the KitGuru Labs in December. It was a simple looking device called the Patriot Gauntlet Node and it retails for £79 at the time of writing. Technically, it's a wireless data and media streaming device with a battery life of up to 5.5 hours. It works with both SSD and regular 2.5″ hard drives – and the range is more a function of ‘line of site' than physical distance. It supports 802.11 b, g and n and has a USB port for fast transfer from your main PC. It weighs just 182 grams, is guaranteed for 2 years, works with everything from the Kindle Fire to the iPad and is guaranteed for 2 years. Our Hardware winner for Product of the Year goes to the Patriot Gauntlet Node.

The software award goes to the latest version of a set of tools upon which so many businesses are now built, including KitGuru. From the very first desktop publishing suites to the CS6 package that Adobe unloaded on the public in Spring 2012, the evolution has been amazing. Even the early versions of Creative Suite were wobbly and could crash without warning.

These days, Adobe provides a solid set of tools for every creative professional – from animators to film makers and from web designers to photo editors. It's something that we all touch on a daily basis, so we're giving our ‘Best of the Rest' award to the cloud-enabled Adobe Creative Studio 6.

KitGuru Annual Awards 2012 Conclusion

It was a year where the tail-end of the Thai flooding disaster help HDD prices up long enough for SSD to get a strangle hold among KitGuru readers and move from a ‘nice to have luxury' to a ‘must have, now what is the best one I can afford'  kind of product.

New releases from nVidia and AMD into the graphics market meant that anyone with a card more than a year old looks like a proper slouch at the start of 2013.

While performance CPUs hardly figured in 2012, entry level saw the new APU from AMD launched, which will form the basis of the next generation consoles – which was quite interesting in its own right. Compared to other graphics solutions in the market, it is decidedly closer to entry level than performance, but it is so much more powerful than the tired old nVidia and ATi chips propping up today's consoles that we're probably in for something of a revolution next Xmas.

Monitors definitely saw a lot of movement, with the low end 1080p screens becoming so cheap that anyone could now choose to have EyeFinity if they decided that surround-gaming at 5760×1080 was the way to go – but there was also great movement on the price of colour-calibrated, pro-class screens, which we loved.

As internet access packages (both fixed and mobile) became more competitive, we saw the launch of 4G on a small scale, while – at the same time – the price of a gigabit router for your home dropped close to £10. That improvement to data transfer meant that more and more of us looked to invest in NAS devices and this is a place where the price drops on 3TB and 4TB hard drives will have the most impact in 2013.

On a software level, we saw some great games hit the market as well as some predictable (but still fun) stalwarts – spoiled only by the launch of Windows 8. Microsoft thinks this operating system is a move forward, but it is hard to find an experienced desktop user that's as enthusiastic about Windows 8 as they were about 7. With some hacks and third party software such as Start8 from Stardock, it is possible to get Windows 8 looking almost identical to Windows 7, but many enthusiast users see no need to move. We would expect Windows 9 to be the next ‘win' for Microsoft – within a desktop environment anyway.

Finally, we all love a good laugh, and Apple's attempt to follow the Google Maps resulted not only in a lot of great jokes, but also the sacking of executives responsible for placing cities in the ocean and ports in the desert.

On a personal note, KitGuru had a great year and a highlight for us as a news organisation was the ability to deliver the world's first photos of the iPhone 5 Prototype: A story which was picked up everywhere – from Fox to Forbes.

Yours,

Allan ‘Zardon' Campbell
~Kitguru Limited Managing Director/Editor In Chief

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