OC3D Best Of 2011 Awards
Motherboards
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
When the LGA2011 socket was released there were only a handful of motherboards available. However the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme was so brilliant it would stand out regardless of how many others are available. Great design, a truly stunning BIOS and all in all a very pleasant motherboard to use. The price is rather eye-watering, but if you want the very best foundation available, this is the board for you. Read our review here Or watch the video review here.
ASUS P67 Sabertooth
The early LGA1155 motherboards fell into two distinct categories. Expensive/great and cheap and cheerful. Then along came the P67 Sabertooth. At £150 it is one of the most affordable motherboards around, yet it looked the business and pushed our 2500K to 5GHz as easily as anyone could hope for. It completely redefined what performance and feature-set we expected for our investment and we were deep into the Z68 motherboards before we started to see similar value. Read our review here.
Gigabyte X58 G1.Assassin
Just when we thought that we’d seen the last of the big X58 motherboards, along came Gigabyte with the excellent G1.Assassin. Not only was it a good performer but the design ethos is what really caught our eye. A lot of boards have a flash name and that’s about it, but Gigabyte took the Assassin name and ensured that the heat-sinks and colour scheme matched the spirit add to that real creative audio a Killer network chip and overclocking good enough to find the aircooling limits of our CPU and you have an awesome package. Read all about it here or you can watch the video review series here.
Gigabyte X58 OC
It’s not often we find ourselves enjoying a board that’s rather short on features, but the Gigabyte X58 OC was one such motherboard. Regularly manufacturers design their motherboards to overclock, except they add an array of features to ensure that your average user might decide to purchase it. The X58OC was 100% pure in that it was built to break benchmark scores, and nothing else. If it didn’t add to the boards ability to create world records, it was left off. Everything was sacrificed in the quest for enormous benchmarks, and it succeeded admirably. Read our sub-zero review here.
