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Creative's X-Fi XtremeMusic won this award last year, and it's back for another round. Nothing has changed, mind you; this is the very same card as a year ago. As much as it might pain me to recognize an identical product two years in a row, there simply isn't a better consumer-level card on the market.
Not that it's easy to match the X-Fi XtremeMusic. For less than $100, you get impeccable fidelity, support for DVD-Audio playback, and the ability to handle up to 128 simultaneous 3D voices in hardware. That's an impressive trifecta, and most competitors can't even match two out of three—not that there are many competitors to begin with.
The X-Fi XtremeMusic rides again
Creative's own business practices have a lot to do with the dearth of competition in the sound card market, and that's drawn the ire of the enthusiast community in the past. Enthusiasts haven't been pleased with Creative's driver bloat, either, although the X-Fi line does offer a relatively clean driver-only installation option that gets rid of all the optional junk. We've yet to encounter the hissing and popping problems that some users report exists with certain motherboards, as well.
Since it's still the best consumer-level sound card on the market, and even more affordable this year than last, we see no reason not to let the X-Fi XtremeMusic keep its best sound card award for another year. But we'd love to have more options to choose from next year. Is anyone listening?
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Best hard drive
Western Digital Raptor X
2006 treated us to a number of interesting new hard drives, including one we'll recognize a little later on. However, the king of the hill throughout the year was the latest addition to Western Digital's 10k-RPM Raptor line. Long criticized for offering too little storage, WD doubled the Raptor's capacity to 150GB for the new revision. Cache was also doubled to 16MB, and support for Native Command Queuing was added in lieu of the decidedly more obscure Tagged Command Queuing found on the older Raptor WD740GD.
Interestingly, though, WD chose not to support 300MB/s transfer rates with the new Raptor. Nevertheless, the new Raptor was easily the fastest Serial ATA hard drive on the market, thanks in large part to its spindle speed advantage over slower 7,200-RPM drives.
The Raptor X and its audacious window
Western Digital actually rolled out two versions of its new Raptor in 2006: the Raptor WD1500ADFD, and the Raptor X. Both offered identical specifications and performance, but the latter featured a windowed view of the drive's internals. That's right: Western Digital put a window on a hard drive.
As one might expect, the windowed Raptor X cost more than the vanilla WD1500ADFD—$50 more at launch, to be exact. That premium has shrunk since the Raptor's launch, and as far as we're concerned, it's a small price to pay for the unique cachet that comes with the only window available in a production hard drive. The fact that Western Digital had the engineering expertise and audacity to equip a 10k-RPM hard drive with a window makes the Raptor X an easy pick for the best hard drive of 2006.
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Coolest product
Gigabyte i-RAM
Gigabyte's i-RAM solid state storage device doesn't really fit into any of our best hardware categories, but for me, it was by far the coolest product of 2006. I've been around long enough to remember RAM disks, and that's essentially what the i-RAM is, but without all the hassle. Through the magic of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) chip, the i-RAM allows DDR memory to appear as a standard Serial ATA hard drive. No special drivers or software are needed, just a Serial ATA cable and standard DDR DIMMs.
In addition to being ridiculously easy to set up, the i-RAM offers blistering performance, phenomenal access times, and complete silence. With a street price hovering around $120, it's also an incredible value considering the cost of other solid state storage devices. The fact that you can add your own memory is a nice touch, too, and that goes a long way towards keeping the i-RAM's price affordable.
Unfortunately, i-RAM isn't perfect. The current version is limited to 150MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates that it has no problem saturating, and total capacity is capped at 1GB per DIMM, or 4GB total. That all but corners the i-RAM in a niche. Since it acts like a standard Serial ATA hard drive, however, there's nothing (save for cost considerations) stopping you from building a multi-i-RAM RAID array to achieve higher capacities and even more exceptional performance.
Regardless of its status as a niche product, the i-RAM is undeniably cool. You won't find a faster storage device that plugs into a Serial ATA port for anything close to the i-RAM's price, even when fully loaded, and that puts a huge grin on my face.
