Products: Nvidia

While the PCI Express 2.0 standard was ratified in early 2007, we're only just now starting to see products supporting the faster interface — which doubles the basic I/O of a connection to 5Gbps. (Actually, 2007 millimeter Vanguard Award winner Ciprico beat most companies to market with its MediaVault 5100 series, which uses the higher speed connection as a crucial part of its high-speed disk array. See millimeter's Vanguard Awards for more.)

Now graphics gets its due with Nvidia Quadro FX 3700, which doubles the graphics throughput over the previous generation of this high-end card. Of course, there's more to it than that: You'll get 112 parallel processors, 512MB of onboard memory, and a 256-bit-wide memory interface. Nvidia's Application Configuration Engine (ACE) is also handy, because it automatically configures the graphics hardware and software to max out each app's performance. www.nvidia.com