The other awards
2006 was full of events and trends that don't necessarily fit into our best hardware categories, but that doesn't mean they got off without recognition. We've cooked up a special batch of awards to reward some notable moves and to chastise a few things we'd rather forget.

Worst trend
Renaming for marketing
We may have named the nForce 570 SLI the best chipset of the year, but that doesn't get Nvidia off the hook for being a little too creative with product renaming. You see, although the nForce 570 SLI was available as single-chip core logic, it also picked up a few aliases as Nvidia pressed it into service in other chipsets. In the end, that single chip ended being known not only as the nForce 570 SLI MCP, but also the 590 SLI MCP, and the 680i SLI MCP.

And it gets worse.

You'd think that the nForce 570 SLI for Socket AM2 would be similar to the nForce 570 SLI for Intel CPUs, but you'd be wrong. The 570 SLI for Intel actually didn't contain an nForce 570 SLI MCP. Instead, it was merely a rebadged version of the an older nForce4 chipset. Confused yet?

Nvidia defended its creative renaming by suggesting that it was merely changing names to help differentiate its products. An nForce4 chipset became the nForce 570 SLI for Intel, Nvidia says, merely to denote support for Core 2 processors. But why not call it the nForce4.1? Or the nForce4 Core? Or anything that doesn't suggest an nonexistent upgrade to an nForce 500 series chipset.

Regardless of whether Nvidia's intent was malicious, renaming products to suit marketing agendas doesn't sit well with us. The market is confusing enough as it is for uninitiated consumers, so be straight with them. Call a product what it is, not what you think you can get away with.

Best move we thought we'd hate
Rebadged Nvidia reference mobos
We've bemoaned the lack of variety in the graphics card market on more than one occasion, and 2006 was a banner year for rebadged reference designs. These days, graphics board manufacturers do little more than resticker the heatsink on high-end graphics cards, and that has resulted in a rather dull market.

With restickered reference designs diminishing the number of unique graphics card offerings, we shuddered to learn that Nvidia would be offering complete nForce 680i SLI reference motherboards for resale by its partners. But it really didn't turn out as badly as we might have expected. The availability of a ready-for-retail nForce 680i board design hasn't stopped Abit, Asus, and others from coming up with their own designs for the 680i SLI. What it has done, however, is allowed smaller players like BFG Tech, EVGA, and even ECS make a play for enthusiast motherboard dollars.

The nForce 680i SLI reference board: Built by Nvidia, rebranded by others

The real kicker here is that Nvidia actually built quite a good motherboard with its nForce 680i SLI reference design. Apart from Serial ATA signaling problems that appear to have been fixed with a BIOS update, the board offers an excellent layout, competitive performance, a feature-rich BIOS, and loads of overclocking headroom. In fact, the reference design is probably much better than what less experienced mobo makers like BFG and eVGA would have been able to come up with on their own; it's certainly an improvement over ECS's attempts to produce a good enthusiast board, and they've been building motherboards since the dawn of time.

Of course, just because we like the nForce 680i reference design doesn't mean we want to see every motherboard maker selling the board with little more than a new sticker. Bigger players like Asus, Abit, DFI, Gigabyte, and MSI should be able to do better, and with the likes of BFG and eVGA nipping at their heels with a capable reference design, we hope it forces them to raise the stakes even higher.

It's about time
Perpendicular recording
Enthusiasts have been waiting for perpendicular recording technology to make its way into desktop hard drives for years, and we've had Hitachi's "Get Perpendicular" song stuck in our heads for pretty much the whole time. Fortunately, 2006 brought us our first taste of perpendicular recording with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 series. The 7200.10s were the first 3.5" desktop drives to make use of perpendicular recording tech, and they did so in style, offering a flagship model with a whopping 750GB of storage capacity—50% more than the next largest drive on the market.

Perpendicular recording facilitating Seagate's 750GB monster

The Barracuda 7200.10 750GB was released in May, and some eight months later, we're still waiting for a higher capacity hard drive to hit the market. The fact that Seagate was able to hold a 50% storage capacity lead over the competition for the better part of the year is an impressive feat in and of itself, but what's more striking is that the 750GB flagship didn't carry an obscene price premium. The 'cuda was the most expensive SATA hard drive on the market, of course, but its cost per gigabyte was comparable to that of 500GB drives.

Seagate was the only manufacturer to bring perpendicular recording to the desktop in 2006, but it joined Fujitsu and Hitachi in offering mobile drives with perpendicular tech. 2007 looks to be the year that perpendicular recording will really take hold, though. Hitachi has already announced plans to release a five-platter terabyte drive that uses perpendicular platters in the first quarter, and Seagate is promising a four-platter terabyte disk in the first half of the year.