UMPCS ARE THE STARS of online reviews these days, and the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (Linux Edition) seems to follow that trend. This is HPs answer (sort of) to Asus’ EeePC or MSI’s Wind, a crafted block of aluminium with glossy black bevels and silver bits – definitely lacking the plastic toy look of the competition. Since it’s the Linux Edition it ships with 1GB of RAM (2GB on the Vista edition), but if you think you’ve got a powerful machine under the bonnet, consider it’s a 1.2GHz Via C7 CPU – forget HD video or any heavy computing. Speaking of HD Video, this tiny notebook doesn’t ship with any sort of Divx/Xvid player. So it does look good, but once you turn it on you get the feeling HP could’ve done a bit more software-wise. That may be too much for £350. Look at the nice gadgetry here.

The hardly known memory company, Cellshock, has kitted out Chile Hardware with a few samples of their brand new PC3-15000 (ie: DDR3-1866) memory. Like most DDR3, testing this is a matter of trial and error, but CHW thinks they did a bang up job with cherry picking the memory modules and allowing decent overclocks on an already high-rated kit. Still, it takes 280 €urobucks to buy them, that’s almost $440... for 2x1GB. Read the review here, or here in English

You may have heard of Eagle Tech, or maybe not, but that’s not the point. OCIA is testing their N- and I-Series external HDD enclosures. The I-Series offers JBOD functionality for two SATA I or II hard drives, while the N-Series is slightly sleeker and fits just one. The enclosures are actively cooled and being SATA to USB do the right old job of cocking up transfer speeds to USB 2.0 levels (about 35MB/s). There’s a lot of value in them, but it’s really for storage rather than performance tasks. For $40 (I-Series) or around $20 (N-Series) you can’t get a much better deal, can you? Read on.

Passively cooling CPUs is a big challenge, but a necessary one if you want absolute silence coming from your PC. MadShrimps has a couple of passive heavyweights that they used to stress test their Pentium 4 524 system. The candidates were Cooler Master’s Z600 and Scythe’s Ninja CU. So how far can a kilogram of copper take you? Well, you’ll have to take a look at the pretty (long) graphs MadShrimps has posted. Right here, make yourself at home.

TechARP’s Adrian Wong has written up an interesting article on Intel’s latest chipsets (although no info on the X48). The whole Eaglelake family is there, from G41 up to P45. Looking at the tables you can see that Nvidia might be facing a bit of an existencial crisis once the only chipsets on the market supporting SLI are their own. That might be a problem. It also looks like Intel’s GMA4500 series IGP will be a headache for consumers trying to figure out what’s what. Catch it here.

Silent PC Review is looking into something that you won’t really find on a store shelf, but rather bundled with Intel’s latest CPUs. Intel has recently moved to a leaner form of HSF, the FCLGA4-S. Contrary to popular belief, this cooler actually has more than a spinning fan and some metal fins to cool down your cores. Although it uses the evil push-pin design, the combo isn’t too heavy and it deals with the load quite well, it seems. Performance is actually pretty decent, according to Mike, but it’s the whiny fan and rattling fins that prove a pain. Read on. µ