4th OCWORKBENCH Readers' Award

Best overclockers Mainboard

Asrock 939Dual-SATA2, and then the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra, followed by DFI’s very popular LANPARTY UT NF4 Ultra-D. Even though over at the “Hall of Fame” (Futuremark), DFI dominated with it’s NF4 boards.

Best Cost/Performance Mainboard

Asrock was known as the cheap spin-off Asus that produced mainboard and nothing else. Nobody really took notice of them until this year when they came up with the Asrock 939Dual-SATA2. (incidentally, it’s paired with the ULi M1695) It blow the competition away with its’ cheap cost, yet performance that rivals the more expensive NF4 based boards. They were the first to market with the ULi M1695/M1567 with full support for both PCIe x16 and AGP 8X.

EPoX 8NPA SLI got the second spot for being the first true mainstream SLI motherboard using the cheaper Socket 754 instead of the more expensive Socket 939. Great for the limited budget gamer, who will probably be pairing it up with the 6600GT/LE.

Asrock 939NF4G-SATA2 coup with an Athlon 64 Sempron, it becomes a great value MCP combo. As a mATX board, it fits easy in most casing with plenty of space to spare.

This time round, Asrock wins both driver and constructor? Not yet, read on as there’s still Best mainboard package and mainboard manufacturer.

Best Mainboard package

EPoX 9NPA+SLI pulls all stop to grab the top spot from the Gigabyte GA-81955X Royal. It was really too close to call a winner on this, but the votes say otherwise. Maybe it was the handy screwdriver that was in the package that got EPoX the prize? The Gigabyte on the other hand has pretty much everything on “Dual mode”, Universal-plus Dual Power System (U-Plus DPS) , Dual Gigabit LAN, DualBIOS™.

ECS PF88 is the surprise entry with a board that could have been mistaken as the most innovative product. It uses a SIMA A9S converter card to allow it switching from LGA775 to a Socket 939. Yes, a Intel system first, then an AMD system later. (ECS is known for doing such mainboards though)

Most Popular Mainboard Manufacturer 2005

Asrock did not win any in the best manboard package section, but it did enough in the overclocking, cost/performance section to have the voters calling it the best manufacturer. Gigabyte follow in second with EPoX third.

This season is won by Asrock, drivers and constructor first place. No clear second place as EPoX and Gigabyte is tied with two placement in 2nd place each.

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