For us editors of Tom's Hardware Guide, judging products by their technical specs, features, reliability and performance may be a common practice. Day in and day out we supply you with our evaluations and recommendations. You, the reader, however, are mostly playing a rather passive role of reading and digesting our articles. In the end, of course, you are making your own choice once you go and buy a product based on the material you heard and read about.

This time, we asked you, our valued reader, to get actively involved one step earlier. We wanted you to choose the best product in six different categories, based on your experience, knowledge and somehow maybe also based on the stuff you read at Tom's Hardware. For the first time we asked readers to give their recommendation to other readers, and also to state their opinion to hardware manufacturers.

Readers' Choice In 6 Different Groups

In the time between December 21, 2001 and January 25, 2002 we asked you to give us your choice for

The Best CPU The Best Motherboard Brand The Best Chipset The Best Graphics Chip The Best High End Graphics Card The Best High-End Hard Drive

When the 36 days were over, we had collected 55,618 valid votes and today we are finally lifting the curtain to present the first Tom's Hardware Guide Readers' Choice Awards.

A Warm Thank You To The 55,618 Participants

I also haven't forgotten that there was a prize to win amongst the participants of our survey. We will also present you with the lucky winner of Tom's Power Box, a high-end PC system equipped with parts hand-picked by me personally, the Tom behind Tom's Hardware. It is somehow a shame that not each of those 55,618 faithful readers receives some kind of give-away, because they are a highly valued group amongst the about 3 million monthly readers of Tom's Hardware Guide. I also say that because I would have hoped for a few more participants. Are you guys getting lazy, or do you expect better prizes? Please let me know! I want to see at least a six-digit number when I receive the results of our next survey! Thanks to the 55,618 participants! You ROCK!