The NBS Review Team would like to wish all our listeners and readers a Merry Christmas for 2006. We hope you all get want you wanted (material or otherwise).

- Hiren / Richard / Brett

Listen Now:

 The 2006 Awards [48:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

NBS Award Winners:

Game of the Year: Dead Rising (Rich), Oblivion (Brett), Lego Star Wars 2 (Hiren)

Product of the Year: Intel Core Architecture (Unanimous)

Best Company of 2006: Brett nominates NVIDIA (we all agree)

Worst Company of 2006: Sony (Unanimous)

Worst Game 2006: Broken Sword 4 (Rich), Dark Star One (Hiren),

Worst Product Launch of 2006: PS3 (Unanimous), Zune (Richard, Hiren), AMD Athlon AM2 (Richard)

Best Podcast of 2006: NBS-Review (Obviously)

Best Gadget of 2006: Plantronics Audio 510 USB Headset (Hiren), Logitech MM28 Speakers (Brett), Tom Tom’s (Richard)

Worst Gadget of 2006: Sapphire Motherboards (Richard), BMWs iDrive (Hiren), ATI Chipsets, Windows Mobile 5 (Brett)

Product/Service most anticipated in 2007: Office 2007, Wii Virtual Console (Richard), Wiimote (Hiren), Steam (Brett), Virtualisation (Richard)

Episode Notes:

Off topic heaven! Core - 680i - Overclocking - Free ones? - Shared Cache: Core versus K8L? - Cache architecture - History of cache implementation - software using it.. Wooooo.

In hindsight, I think Brett is totally on the money nominating NVIDIA as the company of the year. If you’ve been following NV’s stock price it’s almost doubled in the last twelve months!

691 Million TRANSISTORS. Not transsexuals. I should think before I talk.

Games that should be remade and not fucked with: Freelancer (Good call, Brett).

Broken Rec-Rec-Rec-Rec-Rec-Record Time: Ripping it into Sony. Actually the rootkit was 2005, but the building defacing was this year, along with Racist advertising and lets not forget the most recent Viral Advertising. Anyone else think they should have stopped at PS2? Maybe we shouldn’t bring up Betamax or the Bookman, maybe Blu-Ray will win? It might end up like their UMDs, although the MiniDisks were slightly more successful. I could go on, but I’m sure I’m boring you.

NOT! That I ever imply that women can’t read maps. That was not an insinuation I made, merely arguments do happen and as we were all guys, obviously the most likely person to have in the seat next to us is the significant other.

Brett tells me you can get 45 hours battery life with 4AAs on his Logitech speakers. It is an awesome bit of kit.

Lets hope ATI’s RD600 doesn’t suffer from the same problems as previous ATI chipsets. Lets hope Sapphire doesn’t get a hold of it.

Music: FOUR MINUTES of the awesome Whispers from Lagoona by Andreas Viklund! Hiren, posted the whole track! WOOT!

Anyone has any other nominations; feel free to leave a comment!

- Richard

I hope you all enjoy our first (and possibly last) award show, we thought it was the right time to reflect on the years technology progress and look foreward to the future.

- Hiren