TECH OF THE YEAR
Our awards for the best tech of 2015
Another year has passed through the PC PowerPlay labs, which means I’ve mashed my fingers on countless motherboards, grazed my knuckles on a gazillion GPUs, and had the occasional electric shock or two while testing power supplies. It also means it’s time to sit back, take a breath, and see which goodies took out the Tech of the Year awards for 2015.
I’ve now been blessed with the job of technology reviewer for over 16 years, and have to say that 2015 was a rather big one in terms of innovation. While it’s becoming trickier than ever for Intel and AMD to create faster CPUs, the rest of the hardware industry found ways to improve on their goodies. Monitors in particular picked up steam, thanks largely to Nvidia’s G-Sync technology. AMD teamed up with VESA, the folks who create the industry-wide standards used on our PC displays, to develop an open version of G-Sync, called FreeSync, and through the year I watched this evolve from a rather buggy, limited standard to a product that is basically equal to NVIDIA’s proprietary tech. I give it another three or four years before FreeSync is supported by every display and GPU on the market, and that includes Nvidia.
Storage solutions also saw massive leaps in performance, with the adoption of both M.2 and NVMe doubling and tripling SSD speeds. I’m now using an M.2 drive in both my gaming and office rig, and the desktop performance improvements are palpable, though games don’t see much of a boost. Thankfully the ongoing GPU war between AMD and Nvidia did give our games a framerate boost, though it was a shame to see AMD’s brand new GPU design fail to give Nvidia the black-eye it needs to stay competitive.
One thing that was really noticeable over the year was how terrible our Aussie dollar was. As it plummeted in value against the US dollar, the prices of new release products increased to the point where they simply weren’t good value – buyers were better off buying older products that were imported on a stronger dollar. It was good news for me though, as it meant local Aussie reviews really had a point of difference to those written in the US and UK, where the price/ performance ratio was totally different, though I’m sure the local hardware vendors weren’t as impressed.
Anyways, the following pages are a tidy little summary of all the award winners that graced our pages in 2015, which should serve as a great buying guide if you’re on the hunt for hardware. I’ve also taken a little look at 2016, or as I like to call it, the year Virtual Reality became a Reality. At last.