Great report, I concur with everything you say.
Keep up the great work!

I think he is talking about legecy dos drivers, but DosBox makes them practically obsolete.

No...

http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm

You know, I've been waiting for standardized pin-outs for front panel connectors and such for about 10 year now. This will be my #1 "Why the hell not, you bastards!!!" item until they finally do it.

Seriously, WTF? It's just sheer stupidity.

Grrrrrrr.

that must be it. *rolls eyes*

Glad you agree.

dunno what you're talking about, man.

i'm running x64 @ home, and my creative audigy 2 zs works just fine.

Maybe because you didn't read what I said.

Biggest sign of the coming apocalypse: Apple goes for Intel inside

What a surprise that was. I'm still wondering, why not AMD? Rejected intel labels...
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/769.html

Creative deserves no respect, and it has nothing to do with Aureal or driver bloat.

They threatened to sue the Carmack to force EAX into Doom 3. That's just plain dirty. SCO dirty.

BF2, one of the year's biggest releases, didn't support audio hardware acceleration for any cards than than Creative's own Audigy 2 or newer. It's one thing to not support proprietary crap like EAX x.0, but hardware accel???? EA gets a MMD for participating in this. I would expect a huge outcry if a game dev got in bed with Nvidia and only supported hardware accel in 7800GTX cards.

Oh, and $300 soundcards? WTF? Fata1ity my pimpled white ass.

Hey, was there a "Most Marvelous Memory" category? Didn't see memory listed here....

Most of this was head-on. Creative, though, still has unresolved driver issues, which is why I've been using Kx drivers for over a year now on my Audigy 2. I love the hardware, but they do not put as much love into the drivers / software side of development.

Their heavy use of legacy I/O drivers should raise a fair number of questions.

Take a look in your non-Plug and Play Drivers section of Device Manager and explain exactly why Creative needed six I/O legacy drivers?

Names like Creative Hardware Abstract Layer Driver really inpires confidence too.

These legacy I/O drivers cannot work in XP x64 or Vista x64 and for generally good reason. In addition to the great harm they can cause stability, they can also pose pretty serious security threats as well. User level programs having direct hardware access = bad.

I wonder if the reason there are no WiFi ready mobos out there is lack of real estate on the mobo for all the goodies it needs. That and having a "black box" somewhere on the board would put off mobo mfgrs. Maybe even power requirements?

Very good article, and with just the right amount of tongue-'n-cheek, too...;) Nothing is more dreadful than "serious" end-of-year product evals. You managed to make excellent points without becoming self-absorbed in the process--a worthy achievement by any journalistic milestone.

Happy New Year!

No chipset award for Intel because their CPUs have some inferior interface?

Thats seems alittle biased. Love thy Intel chipset is always the motto. Flawless integration, always works, no wierdo issues like DMA corruption and the like.

Maybe I missed to read the chipset for AMD only award subject somewhere.

Else I pretty much agree on the other parts. Tho I don´t know if I want to put the small WD 10k RPM drive there. It´s pretty small and pretty expensive. It would be like chaning the best CPU from a X2 3800 to a 4800.

I too have been wondering for some time what good a second ethernet port does on a enthusiast motherboard... I would never use one unless the other died... A redundant ethernet jack?

I would also find ALOT more use out of a integrated Wi-Fi connection. Games are playable on Wi-Fi (RTS's especially). FPS's have a bit of trouble unless you have good hardware and a strong signal. I played for half a year on someone open Wi-Fi at my dorm becasue they capped the bandwidth so hardcore. USR Access Point and I had no problems. It would be a easy way to setup a lan party... Especially if everyones in the same room. Maybe not for large ones but for the casual ones that means no cords to cleanup and decent gaming.

There is alot of other things I wonder that should be right up manufacturers allys but theres no use posting it here -_-

I think the problem with X64 is that most ethusaiast expect a massive performance boost from moving to 64-bit code. At most it will only yield a 2-5% performance boost, more accurate calcautions and cleaner code.

The reason why XP got such a good driver library at launch is that its kenrel has been around for years (NT 3.5-W2K). X64 is barely a year old and perpeherial drivers will eventually get around, but it will be limited to the newer stuff. The impending launch of Vista will ensure it.

Why do motherboards need intergrated Wi-Fi? Wi-FI is pretty pointless for a desktop. It is cool that you do not need any wires, but insecurity of any wireless connection is a big "No" for any ethusaist. Wi-Fi belongs to laptops and other moblie platforms not desktops. Desktops usually stay in one place for extented periods of time. It just makes more sense to stick with faster/cheaper wired ethernet

I agree with everything here except the Creative Labs forgiveness you dole out in a disgustingly appologetic manner.

I see Creative Labs sound cards the same way I see Microsoft Windows: it's the best out there, but then, it's the only thing out there and I sure as heck wish there was a viable alternative; and I use both Windows and Creative Labs sound cards for the same reason.

Great article.

I bash Creative as much as the next guy, (i lived with the bloatware and having to pay for driver software back in the day) but nice to see you give them a thumbs up for what they do right, which they have doen with the X-fi.

I also own a 7800GT, which I got for $275 after rebate. Alot of money for some, but It will hold its value well and can be resold easily.
To me, it is THE card to get at this time for the money.

Lastly, I hope Abit gets their act together, because they do have a great BIOS and I wish they got back to making great boards. Man did I want my dual Opteron board to be a Abit, but instead I ended with a Supermicro.

Nice award show guys.

A lack of widespread availability in enthusiast-oriented products also takes ULi's complete chipset offerings out of the running for best chipset. That's really a shame, since ULi did some interesting things in 2005. Most notably, the company's M1695/M1567 chipset hung a real AGP 8X interface off the south bridge. That allowed motherboards to be built with full-bandwidth AGP 8X and PCI Express x16 slots, providing plenty of flexibility to upgraders. Unfortunately, the chipset was only available on bargain-basement boards that lacked many of the features and BIOS options that enthusiasts have come to expect as standard.

And you guys didn't review one of these innovative and economical boards, which was disappointing. A good T/R review would've gone a ways in convincing many Socket A users to buy one of these boards.

How long before A_Pickle comes on ranting and raving about how T/R has unfairly beat up on poor old Intel?

I completely agree with the 512MB low-end card bullcrap. That is the most frustrating question I'm asked at work by my technician coworkers and (more often) army of computer lab assistant peoples. Unfortunately, whenever someone is thinking about buying a new video card, it almost always needs to be explained to them again lest they feel bad that they're buying a product without a huge meaningless cost-inflating number attached to it.

To simplify things, I've resorted to telling people the not completely truthful "memory clock matters more than memory amount." I'm sure that will come back to haunt me eventually.

Thank you for bringing attention to the Intel eXXXtreme peformance hilarity, too. That stuff is unacceptable.

Mmmm, I wonder if I can get a Geforce4 MX with 1GB RAM... man that's GOT to be fast!!!

Most of this was head-on. Creative, though, still has unresolved driver issues, which is why I've been using Kx drivers for over a year now on my Audigy 2. I love the hardware, but they do not put as much love into the drivers / software side of development.

Hooray for the Meaty Middle Digit ( MMD)!

Thanks for not giving the nod to the Nforce 4. My IDE drivers took a dive on me, and im now running my x64 partition as backup.