OUR AMERICAN FRIENDS are likely to be busy today – being the Independence Day’n’all – but there’s time for a lot of reading today… While world+dog looks on at the P45, X48 and G45 chipsets, the “mainstream” mobo market is receiving its first tastes of the P43 variety. Naturally Asrock has dibs on the alternative chipsets, and has already put out the P43R1600Twins-WiFi model. The P43 is a cut-down P45, as you know, populated with 2 PCIe x16 slots (electrical) but with x8-wide paths. That’ll let you run dual Crossfire. It also supports Extremely Expensive edition CPUs thanks to the stretched 1600MHz bus. It also supports DDR3-1333 and DDR2-1066 (great for upgraders). That’s a pretty powerful feature set for such a mobo. Check it out, here.

Technic3D has a review of a Polish mouse+keyboard combo kit. Yes. Polish. The name it’s the ET-656 and it’s the product of said Polish company, Easy Touch. Not that wireless+keyboards are anything difficult to build, but it is nice to see something coming out of eastern Europe (other than a computer virus) every now and then. It’s a pretty basic affair, suited more for office environments than enthusiast gaming, but hey, it’s a rechargeable wireless mouse with a charging dock and all. At €30 you can’t ask for much more. Googlenglish, here.

Hardware Canucks are working their magic with a G.Skill kit, the PI 2x2GB PC3-12800. The company is investing in retail aesthetics with this one, although at time of publishing the only place they could find the memory listed was at Newegg.com. Still, onto details. The kit is rated DDR3-1600 at 7-7-7-18. That’s pretty tight for 2GB DIMMs. It also sports a lifetime warranty. Price is also shifted downwards and become very attractive (considering the density). Interesting review.

Trusted Reviews is looking into the MSI Wind notebook – otherwise known as the U100. Andy wasn’t as impressed as other reviewers out there when looking at a pretty miserable battery life, but overall he thinks it’s a winner – you can’t argue with the price tag, can you? Maybe it’s worth investing in a second battery, or MSI might even bring in 4-cell or 6-cell batteries the next time the Winds blows in. Read on.

The GTX 260 didn’t get nearly half the exposure as its bigger brother the GTX 280, but the reviews are trickling in and TechPowerUp has one of them today. The PoV GeForce GTX 260 Assassin’s Creed Edition. You get … Assassin’s Creed and something of a top-range graphics card with Hybrid Power (always good), great overclocking, triple SLI support and CUDA/PhysX support. You’ll find it hard to justify the price when weighed against a similarly-performing HD 4870, though – on the other hand – nowadays you just can’t go wrong in choosing a graphics card, now can you? Catch it here.

Oh boy, a couple of days ago I mentioned that there was a Gigabyte competition taking place in the States and that participants were using X58 mobos as there testbeds. Well, Angela from Gigabyte dropped me a nice email pointing out that they were in fact using X48 mobos, but the winners have actually won X58 mobos (as soon as they become available) from Gigabyte’s press sample quota – under NDA. Still, the list of prizes looks like a system config, and you’d turn green with envy just by looking at it. µ