Legit Editorial Reviews
The Legit Reviews Best of 2009 Hardware Awards
| Manufacturer: | Various |
| Product: | Best PC Hardware of 2009 |
| Date: | Wed, Dec 23, 2009 - 08:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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Legit Reviews Best of 2009 Awards
It is hard to believe that another year flew by so quickly, but it has! That means Legit Reviews has turned seven years old and that you have likely come across one of the hundreds of reviews that we have published this year. Since the year is almost over and new product launches are pretty much done for the year that means we can pick out the best products that were introduced in 2009!
Best Processor of 2009:
Winner: Intel Core i7 860 - $279.99Runner Up: Intel Core i5 750 - $189.99
The Intel Core i7 'Nehalem' series of processors and AMD Phenom II series came out in November of 2008, so that pretty much leaves just the Intel Core i5 and Core i7 Lynnfield processors as being the best processor series for the year. When these processors came out in September of 2009 they were found to be more affordable than the Core i7 'Nehalem' processor series, while still packing a mean punch for gamers and enthusiasts as we showed you in our review.
The one processor that stood out the most to us was the Intel Core i7 860, which for $280 you get a heck of a processor. You can easily overclock from 2.8GHz to 4GHz with decent cooling and for those that run Folding @ Home you can run the big SMP work units for some massive bonus points with the processor overclocked. This is hands down the mainstream processor to get if you want the best bang for your buck when it comes to performance, overclocking and distributed computing.
Best Video Card of 2009:
Winner: AMD Radeon HD 5000 Series - $139.99 - $649.99Runner Up: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 - $589.99
This one is fairly easy as only one company shook up the graphics card market in 2009, and that was clearly AMD. When AMD announced the Radeon HD 5000 graphics card series they did two things. The first being they took away the performance crown from NVIDIA and the second being they launched the World's first DirectX 11 graphics card.
AMD also didn't just launch one card, they launched five Radeon HD 5000 series cards that start at just $144.99 for the Radeon HD 5750 all the way up to the $599 Radeon HD 5970 graphics card. If you are looking for a graphics card in the $139 to $649 price range and want the latest features like DirectX 11, bitstreaming audio, DirectCompute and Eyefinity then you have only one direction to look.
Best Motherboard of 2009:
Winner (Tie): ASUS P7P55D-E Premium - $279.99 & Gigabyte P55A-UD6 - $249.99Runner Up: EVGA X58 Classified - $499.99
Motherboards continue to use better components and the layout and themes of motherboards have gotten to the point where one might consider a motherboard a work of art. In 2009 we saw numerous motherboards come to market that blew our socks off, but a pair of late entries from that use Intel's mainstream P55 Express chipset from ASUS and Gigabyte quickly won our hearts.
Some of the most affordable processors on the market today are the Intel Core i7 and Core i5 CPUs for socket LGA 1156 platforms. It came as quite a shock to many that this platform would be the first to support both SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps technologies! Legit Reviews used the ASUS P7P55D-E Premium in our performance analysis of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and found that board's NEC USB 3.0 controller to be a must have feature for the future. Both boards feature SATA 6Gb/s support thanks to a Marvell controller, but we see SATA 6Gb/s too neat of a feature that we will all move over to in time. Our performance testing didn't show huge performance improvements like we saw with the jump from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0.
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