If you’ve been computing long enough, you can probably tick off some of life’s touchstones that occurred around the time of each major Photoshop revision and on occasion tell yourself, “Wow, I remember when Photoshop was just born, err, released.”

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If you read our original review of the X-Fi way back in November 2005, you already know about this card. Back then, Creative packaged this exact same card with a drive bay and remote and charged an impossible to justify $280 for the X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS soundcard.

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As we said with the Auzentech, we’re impressed when companies go above and beyond reference designs for products. Razer’s Barracuda AC-1 is such a product. Though it uses the same C-Media Oxygen HD chip as the X-Meridian, you wouldn’t think the two cards were related.

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Soundcards, like videocards, tend to have cookie-cutter designs; products that use the same chipsets look virtually the same.

That wasn’t the approach Auzentech took when it put down the traces for its Auzen X-Meridian 7.1 card. Auzentech says it carefully crafted a custom PCB and added components to get the best possible audio from the card, which is based on C-Media’s top-shelf CMI8788 Oxygen HD “audio processor.” We believe it, too. The board’s traces, layout, and components are vastly different than those of the Razer AC-1 soundcard, which also uses the CMI 8788 Oxygen HD chip.

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ProShow Gold has long been the, umm, gold standard for wedding, portrait, and studio photographers who want to show work to clients on a DVD, and we can see why. With its smooth user interface and dizzying number of effects and customizations, ProShow Gold instantly became our favorite slide-show program.

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Cue up the theme to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father because your mouse has a new best friend. At least, that’s what Logitech calls its difficult to comprehend but nifty to use NuLOOQ navigator.

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How much of a badass mother is Asus’s new motherboard? It’s so bad that it doesn’t even use numbers in its name. Yeah, there’s no R2-D2-like naming convention here. Just call it Striker Extreme, or El Extremerino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

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Among the great mysteries of the universe—the Pyramids, Easter Island, the final season of Seinfeld—you can also include MSI’s RAM color coding.

While the rest of the industry has settled on mounting two DIMMs in slots of the same color to enable dual-channel mode, MSI thumbs its nose at the convention.

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When Abit hit the financial skids and outsourced its motherboard production, enthusiasts turned their mirrors around, broke out the whiskey, and prepared to mourn.

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Lately, we’ve been getting two kinds of systems for review: rigs overclocked to within an inch of their lives (or beyond) and those about as exciting as plain yogurt.

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Remember the first time you used high-speed broadband? Or the first time you fired up a 3D-accelerated game? You’ll experience that same excitement the first time you plug Canon’s miniature HV10 HDV camcorder in to your 60-inch HDTV. Instead of the fuzzy YouTube-esque video you get with your current DV cam, you’ll get video that jumps to life. It’s like, well, it’s like going from standard-definition TV to high-definition TV.

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The Patriot Xporter XT offers the same capacity at less than half the price of Kingston’s drive (reviewed next). Unfortunately, that’s the only stand-out feature we could find.

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Kingston’s DataTraveler Secure is billed as an “enterprise-grade” flash drive. Translated for civvies, that means 256-bit AES hardware encryption, an IPX8 waterproof rating, and a titanium shell. Oh yeah, and optimization for small files. While almost every key we’ve tested in the last few months choked on the 10,000 Word docs we feed them during testing, the DataTraveler Secure was able to write that onslaught of files in three minutes instead of the usual 20 minutes.

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Corsair’s Flash Voyager isn’t the largest thumb drive around, but it sure is affordable, as well as speedy. In our tests, the Voyager ran away from all the others here in large-file transfers, and only Kingston’s drive could match it in medium-size JPG file copies.

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Nvidia’s first attempt at playing motherboard maker (with its AMD AM2 boards) was good, but there was definitely room for improvement. With the 680i, Nvidia gives the mobo game another go, and dives even deeper. Not content to just design boards, Nvidia is now manufacturing them too. These boards are in turn sold through partners, such as the EVGA board reviewed here.

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We think we’re seeing a pretty solid pattern here. As is true of the Star Trek movies, it’s possible that only the even-numbered Nvidia chipsets are worth a damn. The original nForce was a beta product. The nForce2 was great. The nForce3 sucked eggs. The nForce4 SLI kicked much booty. And then there’s the nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition, which was hyped more than a David Blaine stunt, and might be just as anti-climactic. Originally scheduled for availability in August, boards using the laggard chipset didn’t appear until late October—just before boards using the newer nForce 680i were released. What’s the point?

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It’s no secret that Nvidia had a heavy hand in designing Foxconn’s excellent AM2 Athlon 64/nForce 590 SLI board, but Foxconn’s Intel-powered 975X7AB-8EKRS2H board suffers for a lack of Nvidia-applied polish.

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Combining a Blu-ray drive with a USB interface seems at first like hitching a flying saucer to a wheelbarrow. Can USB’s meager bandwidth handle such newfangled technology? Even at full-tilt, 2x Blu-ray burns hover in the 8MB/s range, which is actually slower than an 8x DVD burn. So, yes, USB 2.0 provides plenty of bandwidth.

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