EVER GOT THE FEELING you’re getting ripped off? We all have some time or other… and if you’ve bought an SSD of late – and it wasn’t the OCZ Core Series – then get ready to feel ripped-off again. OCZ launched the Core series with a decent proposal to lower overall SSD pricing. Laptop Mag took up their challenge and compared the OCZ Core 64GB ($259) and a Samsung SATA II SSD, also 64GB but priced at $800… OCZ does it again, it seems.

Want to see something Really Cool? Then gander on here, where I4U is testing the Really Cool Keyboard. The keyboard is sealed in silicon so you can wash it by dunking it in the sink and wash it over with soap. There’s a backlit and non-backlit version (non-backlit is the one Shane tested). Typing is a bit odd, he thinks, but it’s something you get used to. This thing might go down well with those of you who work on a PC but keep some hand sanitizer close by…

Creative Labs – the once all-powerful lords of PC sound – has been mucking around in the PMP market for a while with some degree of success. Not much, but some. Now they’re latest offer is the Zen X-Fi, which takes the PC’s X-Fi technology into the portable media segment (these things now come with Wi-Fi too, btw). Pocketables pulled one out of the almighty pocket and scribbled a review about it. Oh, the humanity (of listening to music, watching movies…)

Penguinophiles on the lookout for a new 24-inch LCD can take a trip to Phoronix today. The all-penguin team is reviewing the Acer P243WAid 24-inch panel. It’s a bit like many Linux systems: dirt cheap. It doesn’t sport all the features the higher-end models do, but when it comes down to 24-inch, all you want is “cheap”, “HDMI”, “HDCP via DVI” and good brightness. LCDs still aren’t the ideal choice for colour fidelity, so you’ve got a good choice here, for a paltry $390 chirps Mike.

If you live in the world of network and sys admins, you’ll probably enjoy this bit o’literature here at IT Wire. IT Wire goes over the real world RAM and HD tests under Vista and Red Hat Fedora 9. Red Hat seems pretty thrifty when it comes to gobbling up RAM and chewing away at the hard-drive. Vista lives up to its reputation, for good or for bad. Read on.

Foxconn is all revved-up these days. We’ve seen a lot of technologies previewed under the Foxconn flag (like the Renaissance X58 at TechARP) and now the SB750 southbridge on the Foxconn A79A-S at Anandtech. Again, this is just a preview, but there’s plenty of details on how this chip impacts overclocking and system stability. The SB750 is showing a lot of promise, according to Gary.

Ars Technica got round to writing its latest installment of the Ars System Guide: Summer Gaming Edition. Well there’s one thing we know for sure, come Summer, a lot of us spend long days baking in the sun, and long nights playing Crysis or COD4 into the early hours of the morning. If you’re that kind of geek, you’ll listen to the wise words of Mr. Won, at Ars. The biggest change to the system guide revolves around your graphics choices. Plenty powerful, plenty cheap. It’s all good if you’re building your system right now. Catch it here.

George at HillbillyHardware has deployed a Zalman VF1000LED fan+heatsink unit to his hot-and-bothered HD 4850. This is something we’ve seen before (we did the same, but didn’t use the RAM sinks), and we know it works great. Idle and Load temps dropped to almost half their original values under the new fan. Massive results, but like someone pointed out, you still need to move that heat and dump it outside your case… especially in the Summer. Cool your HD4850 right here.

Guru3D’s Hilbert has bitched and moaned to ATI for a go at the HD 4870X2, and he finally got his point through. He’s based in the land of tulips and windmills (that would be Holland, for those who failed at Geography), and that’s why he was left out of round 1. Anyhow, he’s mighty impressed with the less-than-elegant solution that the 4870X2 presents itself to be, and performance is really unmatched in his list of benchmarks. Jaw-dropping good stuff. µ