Best Tech Brands of 2022: HWM+HWZ.com Tech Awards Readers' Choice Results

Computing (Part 1)

And the results are in for Singapore's top technology brands of 2022!

Welcome to the 13th annual HardwareZone+HWM Tech Awards where we honour the best tech products and brands in Singapore. You've seen our complete Editor's Choice results where we handpicked our favourites for Best Mobile Gadgets, Best Gadgets for the Home, Best Devices for Office and Work, and Best Gadgets for Gaming.

Now, it's time to reveal your favourites. This year, we had 45 Readers' Choice categories where you voted for your best tech brands in four major sectors: Computing, Consumer Electronics, Communications & Services, and Gaming.

We tabulated over 13,000 votes in total for this year's polling period, a huge growth over last year, which proves the popularity and relevance of the Tech Awards in recognising the best brands in the industry. We'd like to thank our readers for making the Readers' Choice segment a true reflection of consumer sentiment in a very competitive technology market. Without further ado, the results:-

Best CPU Brand - AMD

Winner Winner, Ryzen Dinner! AMD has edged out Intel in our Readers’ Choice poll for Best CPU Brand. The company has been gaining share on Intel since 2019 beginning with their Ryzen 3000 series chips, growing from 20% to 45% in the past three years, and then finally taking the crown in 2022 with 51% of total votes. This is a testament to the strengths of the current-gen Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. Even as you read this, AMD has just released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, before the next-generation Ryzen 7000 series is slated for launch in the later part of 2022.

Best Motherboard Brand - ASUS

Can anyone beat ASUS in the PC DIY scene? Last year, we talked about how ASUS’ share actually dropped from 62% to 54% in this category, even though it was still pretty much a landslide win for the brand. Still, it showed that users were willing to diversify into some of the smaller, niche brands such as EVGA, Biostar and ECS. This year however, ASUS’ share rose back up to 59%, eroding the votes from the aforementioned smaller brands.

Best SSD Brand - Samsung

Samsung continues to be the fan favourite of HardwareZone readers taking 33% of overall votes counted. SSDs don’t see too much shakeup in terms of product offerings, so this is quite a stable category. We see very similar voting trends each year with some minor movement down the line, such as Seagate and Intel switching places for 3rd and 4th spots. Sandisk gained 2% from last year, eroding Samsung’s share just slightly, but unless a major shift happens in the SSD industry, we would likely see Samsung back again next year for their 9th win.

Best External Storage Brand - Seagate

Unlike the Best SSD Brand category, the Best External Storage Brand category is still quite hotly contested. Seagate may have managed to win this award for the 4th time running now, with 26% of total votes, but the top four brands are pretty close in the running. WD, Sandisk and Samsung have 20%, 19%, and 18% of votes respectively. Standards advancements such as USB4 and Thunderbolt 4 should provide improved performance for such devices in the next few years. We’re also seeing a greater trend in personal computing getting even thinner and lighter, which should give new use cases for external storage.

Best NAS Brand - WD

This year’s Best NAS Brand category has been interesting for two reasons. Firstly, we have seen WD gaining a massive vote share from just 9% in the 2020 Awards, to being the undisputed winner in 2022 with 30% of the total votes. This is a big jump even from second place ASUStor at 19%, which is actually another surprising entry for us, pushing Synology to third place with 18% of votes. Our best guess for this result is perhaps a shift in user-base for NAS devices, with a rise in personal cloud storage for the average consumer, where WD’s MyCloud devices are more popular and more accessible than Synology or Netgear.

Best NAS Storage Brand - Seagate

A new category this year that we created as a result of last year’s voting where Seagate won the Best NAS Brand Award even though they technically do not sell NAS devices at all. As expected, with 48% of the inaugural voting in this category, Seagate has already built itself a solid brand recognition for storage solutions used within NAS devices. And interestingly, even though WD won this year’s Best NAS Brand, they’re not as recognised for their drives alone.