Our readers have been choosing AMD as the brand of the year for the fifth year already. The company still offers high-performance processors. But unfortunately, the price is not already an absolute advantage of top solutions from AMD. Another problem of this vendor is a catastrophic shortage of Socket 939 solutions in retail; AMD does not seem seriously determined to solve this problem. Nevertheless, over ten thousand readers voted for this brand, it's 70.4% of the total number of voters. That is AMD got back to the results of 2001, when the company had won 70.6% of the electoral roll and lost some of its advantage in 2002-2004.

Last year we said that the main problem of Intel was high prices for its solutions. Today it does not seem to us the fundamental reason for accepting Intel by just 23% of the voters. NetBurst dead-end and the lack of bright advantageous (compared to the competitor) solutions do not allow the CPU giant to capture minds of the majority of users. It goes without saying that Intel's sales are high. But it has to do with the above-mentioned passive part of users in the first place. And of course, Intel's situation with CPU availability on the market is much better than in case of AMD. That's what we think to be the reason for the difference between our poll results and sales in the processor sector.

GlacialTech lost many voters - nearly 4% were captured by ICE HAMMER, Gigabyte, and CoolerMaster. But this vendor still stands its ground as a manufacturer of cooling devices at attractive prices. Its models are only moderately noisy, which is confirmed by the results of the open tests of GlacialTech coolers, recently conducted by iXBT.com readers.

In 2005 ThermalTake didn't miss the opportunity to take away a small part of the voters from GlacialTech and Zalman either. Thus, the old-timer on the cooling market increased its share in our poll results from 12.5% in 2004 to 13.8% in 2005.

Samsung has also lost two percents this year. Perhaps the reason was in a great number of fakes or just low-quality modules, sold with Samsung chips. Even the so-called original modules did not always guarantee good performance and stability. As a result, 20.7% or 2909 votes for Samsung.

Corsair is one of the brightest novice leaders in iXBT Brand 2005. This brand has added another 7.4% to its last-year 4.7% votes, which allowed this company to take the third place. There is nothing surprising about it in our opinion. There appeared an initiative man in Russia, working productively in the marketing sphere as well as in memory sales. This expensive memory became very popular among overclockers and modders for this year. Perhaps it's their votes that brought the bronze medal to Corsair this year.

Hynix is only slightly outscored by the novice. The difference between them is 0.5%, so we decided to award Hynix with a bronze medal this year as well. Nevertheless, positions of this brand have faltered. One percent lost is not that much, of course. But should Samsung or Kingston win back what they've lost this year to the vendors of the second three, and Hynix may lose its iXBT bronze status.

Everything is quite dull in the motherboard nomination. ASUSTeK lost some of its advantage, gained in 2004, when it had increased the number of fans of its products by more than 9%. Those 3% lost are hardly threatening ASUSTeK, if we recall that only 22% users voted for this company in 2002.

What concerns the silver category, Gigabyte is trying to return the second place, lost in 2001. EPoX and Gigabyte were snatching the second place from each other in turns during our poll time. As a result, we can see an approximate parity in the number of votes.

In fact, the second place would have been a natural result for Gigabyte. This brand is much larger and more versatile, it maintains a lot of staff in Russia. While nearly 80% of EPoX world sales fall on Russia, this company has only one distributor here. EPoX spends very little on branding or advertisement and manufactures no extraordinary image products.

Thanks to the fight for the second place between Gigabyte and EPoX, MSI got the bronze medal with its 7.2%. MSI also gained from a considerable reduction of ABIT votes this year, as this company nearly stopped manufacturing motherboards. It had a noticeable effect on company's position in our rating. A similar situation is with Albatron, Soltek, Chaintech, who used to sell well in Russia and had a lot of fans.

NVIDIA broke the three-year leadership of ATI, having won 57.6% of voters. That was a well-deserved award. These days the company offers the fastest and the most fine-tuned graphics solutions. NVIDIA's pricing policy allows to choose a balanced solution practically for any income level. It didn't happen in a day. In 2003 ATI occupied the first position in our poll with its 70% of votes. Last year NVIDIA's solutions captured 44% of our readers, this year already 57.6% of the poll participants placed it on top of the rating, awarding it with gold.

ATI started to prove oneself in the right only by the end of the year. It goes without saying that new video cards of the new X1x00 series find its users. But if we face the truth, X1800XT prices are too high, Middle-End cards only started to appear on the market in noticeable quantities, and the X1300 price does not match its functionality. If ATI takes this issues into account in 2006, we have chances to see a gripping battle next year.

But Gigabyte seems not to have missed an opportunity to snap off a bit of ASUS and Sapphire's fans, having gained about 4% versus the last year. Gigabyte collected 11.6% of votes in this poll. These results allowed the company to take the bronze.

In our previous poll we decided to merge nominations for readers and recorders of all types. Fortunately, today you can buy a decent device for a couple dozens of dollars and it will be able to read and record nearly all media types.
In 2004 NEC pushed the former leader off the podium - TEAC, who used to manufacture excellent CD-ROM drives at reasonable prices in the past. Even in 2003 we noted the dropping popularity curve for TEAC. As a result, inexpensive but rather reliable and functional NEC drives brought this company 43.7% of votes and the right to take the first place.

16.1%, 12.2%, and now 9.9%: that's the history of Plextor's brand development in our readers' minds. Out of doubt, Plextor has always been a special brand among optical drives. But the times, when Plextor was a synonym of reliability, are passing. These drives are getting closer to inexpensive models from their competitors, which is quite natural. Nobody needs super reliability for many years anymore. Two-three years are a good service life for an optical storage drive. A new standard may quite appear by that time and these new models will cost the same couple dozens of dollars. We'll see what will happen in our next poll. As for now, the company has a silver model.

Pioneer pushed TEAC out this year, having won 6.9% of all votes. It's difficult to tell whether Pioneer became better or TEAC became worse. But the fact remains - Pioneer gets the bronze medal in 2005.

Another large player on this market, TDK, has won confidence of 22.0% voters, thus improving its previous results by 5% and surpassing the 2003 level.

Perhaps Mirex lacks these very tenths of percent (that raised TDK) to win the bronze medal. Mirex got 4.4% of voters, while it must have collected not less than 5% to enter the top three. Sony and Philips are close on the heels of Mirex. They also lack several tenths of percent to aspire to the iXBT Brand title.

Western Digital is the eternal competitor of Seagate, not an easy mission, especially due to some stereotypes about the WD product quality. But WD is getting better, the company added 1.5% to its 2004 results, practically reaching its 2003 results.

We still remember the words of Samsung marketing department that the Koreans would take up nearly a third of the HDD market.

Integrated audio solutions are getting better and attain to the heights that were previously inaccessible even to inexpensive discrete solutions. People still suffer from stereotypes about integrated audio. Out of their narrow-mindedness, they tried to express them in our poll, though we earnestly requested not to do it. Anyway, the last year leader (NVIDIA) didn't continue to develop its APU. So as a rule, motherboards on nForce 4 have an integrated audio solution from Realtek/Avance Logic (ALC). Nearly every other motherboard uses Realtek audio solutions. Our readers surely noticed that and Realtek has broken away from its competitors (60.5%) and has taken the top position.

C-Media has always followed Realtek. The current poll is not an exception. CMI chips are a tad less popular among motherboard manufacturers, but their audio quality is comparable to Realtek. Like the last year, there are a tad more than 18% of fans of this company. Leaving the first place to Realtek, C-Media is the only silver winner, while it shared the second place with its competitor in 2004.

Analog Devices do not design audio solutions only, far from it. AD is also into designing chips for mobile headsets, ADC for wireless communications, and other important micro components. As NVIDIA disappeared from the list of integrated audio leaders, Analog Devices managed to take the bronze medal, having added 4% to its last year's results.

Considering the fact that the other brands didn't manage to scrape even 5% votes, it would have been groundless to reward them with silver or bronze with these results.

SVEN has been leading in our polls for the four years already. A snug part of the company's success is due to the SVEN-Audio brand manufacturing Hi-Fi componentry. At the same time, popularity of this brand is obviously declining. This year the company has scraped only 23.5% votes, while 29.7% voters preferred this company last year. A year before it was 41.8% of iXBT.com readers, participating in the poll - two percents more than in 2002.

If there are fewer votes here, there must be more votes somewhere else. Microlab evidently got more votes and managed to press Creative - having added another 2.5% to its votes, this company got the silver medal.

Following the success of previous years, Canon has again reached the top, winning 37.5% of votes (5112 people). Canon is recognized and used by many professionals as the most functional cameras, our poll is just another proof of that fact.

In 2003 Olympus could compete with Canon, winning 31.5% of votes. The brand looked noticeably worse in 2004, going down to 19.3%. This year has taken another 7.2% of votes from this vendor. What will happen next year?

Samsung. Did you have any doubts in the beginning of this poll, I wonder? Monitors from the Korean giant have always been deservedly popular for their decent image quality and moderate prices. 3804 (27.6%) users think that Samsung is still worthy of the "iXBT Brand" title this year.

Thanks to high-quality monitors, NEC has been improving its positions from year to year. This year NEC has gained nearly 3%, reaching 16.4%, while this brand had taken only the fourth position the year before last. Of course, it's still far from Samsung, but the growth tempo is good.

The Korean giant still pays enough attention to the CRT market by offering high quality and inexpensive solutions. It's for the first time that Samsung got fewer votes in this nomination than in LCD nomination. 3540 votes or 26.4% voters selected this brand as the leader.

Last year our poll didn't show a definite leader between HP and Epson. But this year the scale has been tipped to the American company. Having lost some weight, HP still managed to take the first place with its 35.3% of votes.

Logitech with its reliable, functional, and stylish mice earned recognition of 7753 users (55.8%). Popularity of this brand even increased percentagewise, as the company fosters its presence and reputation on the market. We are happy to congratulate this company with the iXBT Brand 2005 title.

What concerns Genius, this brand is gradually losing its Brand #1 in the World potential. Only 10.2% of poll participants marked Genius as their favourite, compared to 11.9% last year.

Aside from good mice, Logitech manufactures just as attractive keyboards. Over 40% of our readers prefer this very manufacturer. Logitech demonstrates noticeable growth in this nomination compared to previous years.

While literally two votes allowed Mitsumi to rise to the second position two years ago, this and last years Mitsumi was losing its advantage to Genius. Mitsumi got 13.7% votes two year ago, it was already 11.9% a year later. Now Mitsumi collected only 8.8% of votes. A very little more and Microsoft will replace its competitor on the third place.

ASUStek, Computer, Inc. is not the most active player on the PDA market. The model line of handhelds from this company is rather narrow. It debuted with the successful MyPal A600 that indulged users with a fast Intel XScale PXA250 processor, a convenient case, and a capacious battery. The following model (MyPal A620), especially its BlueTooth modification, took one of the leading positions in the $400 price segment, which allowed ASUS to take the second line in the Handheld/PDA nomination last year. The company still occupies this position with its 2390 votes (19.0%).

ADSL modems is a new nomination in our poll, which came to replace analog modems. Leaders have changed together with the nomination, but the first position in the ADSL segment, as in case with analog solutions, is also occupied by ZyXEL, who aggressively promotes its solutions on the Russian market. The coming of broadband Internet to many homes was connected with the appearance of an ADSL model from ZyXEL. As a result, 44.1% of poll participants voted for "that very ZyXEL"

D-Link is popular for its affordable prices and sufficient quality. D-Link is the first company, who offered retail wireless devices on the mass market. It currently offers a wide range of devices for building networks of any scale. These facts didn't avoid notice of our readers, 3305 of them voted for this brand.

InWin is an old-timer on the market of chassis. Many users, who have been working with computers at least since 486 models, must remember InWin as a manufacturer of high-quality and relatively expensive chassis. Strict design and well thought-out layout have always attracted system integrators, who preferred to work with InWin chassis. A quarter of poll participants are of the same opinion, having voted for InWin.

Thermaltake PC cases are always expensive and always stylish. As a rule, the quality of Thermaltake chassis matches the price, though there are some offensive exceptions. Nevertheless, when you think of modding, Thermaltake almost always comes to mind. It takes the second place in our poll with its 15% votes.

Everybody knows that aside from InWin, Powerman brand is also used by Nienchance and that Inwin PSUs are called (and have always been) Powerman, even when they used to be manufactured by FSP (they had been initially marked as SPI, Sparkle Power Inc.) But several year ago InWin decided to start its own production of PSUs. As a rule, these models are installed into InWin chassis, but power supply units from this vendor can be also bought in retail. InWin's high reputation evidently ensured its high position in our poll. This brand rose to the top place with its 20% of votes.

As in case of chassis, Thermaltake PSU is a modder product in the first place - many Watts, nice illuminated fans, attractive shiny metal. Some people like Thermaltake's features, the others don't. Anyway, there are hardly any computer enthusiasts, who are indifferent to products from this company. Our poll showed that there are quite many fans of this brand, namely 12.5% of our poll participants.