TECH AWARDS 2021 READERS’ CHOICE

In the past, this award was a shoo-in for Intel, with an average split of about 80% of the votes to AMD’s 20%. However, 2020 wasn’t a great year for Intel. From the Apple break-up, to its often confusing 10th and 11th Gen processor roadmap and inability to progress to a 7nm manufacturing process, Intel’s lead as a consumer microprocessor giant has been steadily eroding. AMD on the other hand grew their vote share to 45%. AMD already had 7nm desktop processors out in the market since 2019, with the Ryzen 3000 series based on their Zen 2 microarchitecture. In 2020, AMD released the Ryzen 4000 series, also based on Zen 2 in the middle of the year, and launched a brand new Zen 3-based product with the Ryzen 5000 series. It was so impressive that we actually bestowed the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X our Best Desktop CPU Award in the Editor’s Choice category this Tech Awards season.

For 12 years in a row, you’ve voted in ASUS as the Best Graphics Card Brand in our Readers’ Choice category. And with 45% of votes, that’s saying a lot. We’ve always attributed ASUS’ popularity with the fact that they not only have a vast range of cards for just about any GPU you could want, but also having built up a reputation for custom components and technology that stand out from the usual OEM reference crowd. With high interest in the latest GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, as usual, ASUS covers all bases with a full slate of ROG Strix and TUF Gaming Radeon 6000 Series cards, as well as ROG Strix, TUF Gaming and Dual cards for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series.

Unlike the CPU results, things in the GPU world remain similar to past years. In 2019, NVIDIA captured 82% of the votes, and while there is a slight drop, NVIDIA still garnered 79% of your total votes. Yes, AMD has been making good progress with last year’s RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series. In fact, we were very favourable with our Radeon RX 6800 XT review as a solid 4K gaming GPU. However, it doesn’t look like NVIDIA’s charge since the launch of its RTX series can be stopped. Ray tracing performance is now the benchmark and with last year’s Ampere architecture and RTX 30 Series GPU, NVIDIA just keeps raising the bar. With such a massive lead, it’s no surprise that the NVIDIA RTX 3080 is also the winner of this year’s Editor’s Choice Best Graphics Chip Award.

With 25% of the votes, this would be the third consecutive year Seagate has won the award of Best External Storage Brand in the Readers’ Choice category. The brand increased their vote share from last year by 3%. The next three