The other awards
While our hardware awards cover the best PC components of the year, we're also handing out another other set of awards. These awards were created out of sympathy, frustration, and even disbelief, and we've tried to ensure that everyone got what was coming to them.

Can't get no respect
Creative Labs
With a nod to Rodney Dangerfield, we can't help but sympathize with Creative. Despite easily having the best line of consumer-level sound cards in the business, the company can't get no respect. Not from the enthusiast community, at least. The acquisition of enthusiast darling Aureal soured the community on the peripheral giant, and we weren't shy about slamming the company for its deceptive Audigy marketing. Years of driver bloat, compatibility problems with some VIA south bridge chips and barely incremental innovation didn't help, either.

For a while, bitter enthusiasts had every reason to hold a grudge. However, Creative started to get its act together with the Audigy2. The card offered hardware acceleration for 3D audio, legitimate support for high definition audio, DVD-Audio playback, and generally good audio quality. The driver CDs still came loaded with all sorts of unnecessary bloatware, but it was all optional, and streamlined driver-only installs were a snap. Creative also started innovating again with the X-Fi, a chip whose architecture is a radical departure from not only the company's own offerings, but everything else on the market. Still, many in the enthusiast community insist on holding a grudge, unwilling or unable to see beyond their own fanboy biases and nostalgic attachments to now-irrelevant hardware. That's really a shame, because the stubborn are missing out on the best enthusiast-oriented sound cards around. It's doubtful they'll see the light anytime soon, either.

X-Fi innovation and Creative still gets slagged

Shrewdest move of 2005
NVIDIA buys ULi
ATI's bid for the enthusiast chipset market has been blunted by the numerous problems that plague the company's SB450 south bridge chip. The red team has had an ace up its sleeve, though. By making its Radeon Xpress north bridge chips compatible with ULi's south bridge offerings, ATI gave motherboard partners an alternative to the SB450—a superior alternative, at that. ULi's south bridge chips have had more up-to-date features and better performance than ATI's own, and for a while there, it was rumored that ATI was looking to buy ULi. However, NVIDIA beat ATI to the punch, announcing that it would be the one to acquire ULi.

Acquiring ULi was an exceptionally shrewd move on NVIDIA's part, and no doubt one that was announced with a wry smile, if not a smirk. What better way to score points against a competitor than taking away one of its most valuable allies?

In all fairness, NVIDIA says that current ULi products will continue to be available to existing partners for the near future. Radeon Xpress and CrossFire boards that already use ULi south bridge chips should be unaffected, for now, but there's no telling when NVIDIA will cut off the supply. That uncertainty may discourage mobo manufacturers from designing new CrossFire products using ULi south bridge chips, leaving them with the problematic SB450. That may ultimately affect the number and quality of CrossFire boards available on the market until ATI gets its south bridge in order. Oh, and the green team also gets ULi's assets and a chipset design team that clearly knows what it's doing. Well played, NVIDIA.

Why not?
Motherboard Wi-Fi
Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports are all the rage on high-end and enthusiast-oriented motherboard these days, but I can't figure out why. Seriously, who needs dual GigE ports? Multiple GigE ports are useful for servers, of course, but that doesn't explain why the latest Xtreme Overclocking Gamer Edition motherboard needs two Gigabit jacks. Wouldn't it be better to replace one of those GigE ports with a Wi-Fi connection?

Wi-Fi motherboard bundles with PCI or proprietary riser cards aren't anything new, but as far as I can tell, no one's integrating wireless networking directly onto enthusiast-oriented motherboards. What gives? Integrated Wi-Fi, or even Bluetooth, would give mobo makers one more way to differentiate their products from the mass of copycat designs that currently dot the landscape. Everyone and his mother offers a similar mix of Gigabit Ethernet, Serial ATA RAID, and Firewire peripherals, but no one seems to want to dabble in Wi-Fi. I'd even wager that the majority of users would find an integrated Wi-Fi connection more useful than a second GigE port, either for primary connectivity or as an access point for other wireless devices. How 'bout it, motherboard manufacturers?

Couldn't they replace one of those GigE ports with Wi-Fi?