Who’d have thunk it? Long considered a dead zone, soundcards are making a resurgence. Driven by an outcry for audio that doesn’t sound like a box of snap, crackle, pop every time you access your USB ports, manufacturers are releasing new soundcards that surpass the free audio that comes with your motherboard. This month, we test an Auzentech card that uses a Creative Labs chip and Asus’s new entry into PC audio.

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Who’d have thunk it? Long considered a dead zone, soundcards are making a resurgence. Driven by an outcry for audio that doesn’t sound like a box of snap, crackle, pop every time you access your USB ports, manufacturers are releasing new soundcards that surpass the free audio that comes with your motherboard. This month, we test an Auzentech card that uses a Creative Labs chip and Asus’s new entry into PC audio.

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Miniaturization has brought us amazing advances—tiny transistors, microscopic nanotubes, bite-size Frosted Mini Wheats, and now the Eye-Fi. Combining a 2GB flash card with a Wi-Fi radio, this affordable hybrid card lets you easily upload pictures directly from your camera to the web and your PC.

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As any supporter of a losing sports franchise knows, it ain’t easy being a superfan. For the last two seasons, AMD loyalists have watched Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad embarrass the Athlon 64 and QuadFX off the field. Yet devotees have chanted the refrain of the truly faithful: Come next season, baby, watch out!

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We knew something was up when Nvidia officials were light on details concerning its 780i chipset during a recent press briefing. Normally quite happy to toot its hardware horn, Nvidia practically skipped the PowerPoint slide on the chipset.
Why? Like Intel’s x48, the 780i isn’t really that new. In fact, those familiar with the 680i are well acquainted with the 780i, which is pretty much a 680i with an extra chip (interestingly named the Nforce 200) thrown in to add PCI-E 2.0 support and a full x16 tri-SLI mode.

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Motherboard naming conventions have never been easy to follow, but Asus threw us for a loop with its P5E3 Premium board. Is it an even better version of the stellar P5E3 Deluxe that we reviewed in January? Nope. The board actually features Intel’s newest enthusiast x48 chipset, which is, umm, 10 more than the x38 used in the P5E Deluxe board.

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Just bought a snazzy new camera that records to AVCHD but don’t have the software to edit it? No problem. Ulead’s VideoStudio 11 Plus pitches itself as the only app capable of fully editing video captured using Sony’s and Panasonic’s new H.264-based codec, which works with mini-DVDs, hard drives, and flash memory inside cameras. (Nero was technically first, but its editor is pretty threadbare.)

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We’ve closely watched the Elements kids since their birth, and though we’ve generally been pleased with their development, we’re a bit concerned about Adobe Premiere’s and Photoshop’s offspring. While Photoshop Elements 6 continues to impress us and we’re sure she’s on her way to an Ivy League school and a happy life as a doctor, Premiere Elements has us worried.

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If you’re running your CPU at stock speeds, you’re missing out on your PC’s true potential, because processors often harbor power beyond their official specs. Your proc, for example, might be rated to run at 3GHz but is actually capable of operating reliably at 3.3GHz. There are myriad reasons for the hidden headroom, ranging from natural variance among parts (even those made from the same batch), to the manufacturers’ practice of underclocking parts to meet market needs, to the improved capabilities of a part over the lifetime of its production.

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Seagate wasn’t the first to the 7,200rpm mark, but that hasn’t stopped it from making the fastest hard drive around. The Momentus 7200.2 has a well-deserved reputation as the notebook hard-drive performance king. What you give up in space, you gain in speed—the Momentus easily eclipses the ginormous Western Digital Scorpio in read speed, access time, and all around zippiness. (Seagate has announced but not shipped a 200GB version of this drive.)

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Western Digital has pulled off a significant coup with its 250GB Scorpio notebook hard drive; the device is the current capacity champion. (Fujitsu has also announced a 250GB drive but has not shipped it yet.) Packing 250GB into two platters, the areal density of the Scorpio easily outstrips that of the other hard drive reviewed here—Seagate’s two-platter 160GB Momentus drive.

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An early 16GB SATA solid-state drive from Mtron wowed us, but that was just the beginning. The company’s 32GB version of the drive slays all other contenders for the speed crown.

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We’ll be the first to admit that we were unimpressed by DDR3 when we first tested it last year, but there’s finally a glimmer of hope.

What changed our minds? Asus’s spanking-fast P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP@n mobo, which uses the enthusiast-oriented X38 chipset. The X38’s main highlights are apparently useful DDR3 support and PCI Express 2.0 support. We say “apparently” in reference to DDR3 because we didn’t have a DDR2 version of the board for a direct comparison, but from our tests, the X38 with DDR3 is a winning combination. Also good to have but not a proven performance boost yet is PCI-E 2.0, which doubles the bandwidth of PCI-E 1.0 from 8GB/s to 16GB/s. But does PCI-E 2.0 matter?

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We’ve seen various USB transfer devices over the years, and for the most part they’ve been clunky and sloooow. Not so with Data Drive Thru’s Tornado, which blew into our Lab and impressed the hell out of us. Essentially a coiled, flat USB 2.0 cable that retracts into a plastic housing, the Tornado works by plugging into the Hi-Speed USB ports of two PCs running a newer Windows OS (Millennium, 2000, XP, or Vista). A basic file-transfer application executes from a bit of flash memory in the device, which allows you to simply drag and drop files between the two rigs. Similar cables from other companies force you to install software to transfer files.

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