A £35 R9500 card, £20 loaded s478 mobo, $899 tablet PC

UK
Good ol' Retek is selling a Radeon 9500 for only £34.99+VAT. Well that card is still giving nightmares to the 9600 and lower families. The card is still plenty fast compared to the 5600se and the 5700Le's of this world. With a full 128bit pipeline and a 4x1 pixel architecture, it can still be considered as a good entry level card. It provides full support for DirectX 9.0 and its 128Mb memory will gives DOOM III plenty of space for its texture. The card seems to be an OEM and is refurbished.

it has no cable or software and comes with a 30 days RTB warranty. As usual, the card will overclock from its stock 275/540Mhz to reach Radeon 9500 pro levels fairly easily. Obviously, there are plenty of literature available online to allow you updating the 9500 to 9500 Pro. Digital Daily overclocked the card to 384MHz/337Mhz and performance did increase noticeably with gains of up to 40% in UT2K3 Demo Antalus at 1600x1200. Forget about buying that Radeon 9600SE, get yourself this one.

Another excellent buy from Retek is this very cheap quality motherboard, the MSI 655 MAX-FISR. It features a SIS655 chipset which support Dual Channel technology, SATA RAID, Broadcom Gigabit Lan and Firewire. The 655 Max can support HT CPU with the B0 Chipset. Just ask Retek. Tbe board is on sale only at £20+VAT and comes with a 30days RTB. Note that you will get a retail version of the board. The board features an AGP 50 and six PCI slots. The sound module is a CMedia 9739a and supports SDPIF Out. Other onboard IOs include six USB ports, as well as four DDR slots. Over at MSI, you will find a list of MSI Certified Memory Slots which are capable of running DDR3200. This particular MSI product also features LiveUpdate 3, PC Alert and Fuzzy Logic 4 as well as I-Speeder. The latest BIOS upodate will modify SPD detect method to avoid some DDR CAS set wrong issue as well as updating CPU micro code.

THE UNITED STATES
Still in the realms of Tablet PC. Tigerdirect has managed to deliver one tablet PC under $900 at 899.99. The Viewsonic V1100 is powered by a Pentium 3-M clocked at 866Mhz. It weighs only 3.4 and as so is a lightweight compared to others. One more significant difference is that it operates by default in Portrait mode rather than landscape. Other features are 256Mb memory, a high resolution XGA 10.4in color screen, a 20GB hard disk and a very well thought docking station. The latter features an integrated CDROM, an additional three USB ports and ethernet ports. The VX1100 also comes with integrated LAN and modem as well as a media reader and Ethernet connector. It also has one Firewire and two USB ports together with Audi Out and microphone jacks. One Type II PC slot makes it even more convenient to plug in a variety of cards. If you want something slightly more powerful, then go for that $999.99 Tablet PC from Fujitsu siemens which comes with Free FedEx shipping. This one featureesa ULV Pentium III 933Mhz processor with a 512KB on die L2 cache as well as a shock mounted 60GB hard drive, an altogether more powerful system which is still very much portable and is just slightly larger than an A4 sheet.

Sinhapura
The Albatron FX5700XP Turbo is one of the fourteen models of Geforce FX 5700 that Albatron has currently on its website. But to be honest, I haven't managed to find the FX5700XP turbo per se, only the FX5700P Turbo. It's not a typo though from AGenuine which sells both the FX5700XP and the FX5700P at S$225 and S$245 respectively - we can therefore expect differences to be trivial. The FX5700P Turbo - which has some reviews online- does not use GDDR2 but rather a fast 2.8ns BGA DDR chips. The card also features a large heatsink and all memory chips are covered with passive heatsinks. Overclocking is good not spectacular, expect a 10% o'c from stock 425Mhz/650Mhz to 474Mhz/726Mhz as hardcoreware has achieved. But power lies in the eye of the beholder as showed by the legionhardware review where the later considers the FX5700p to be faster than a Radeon 9600XT while hardwarecore sees the latter as more powerful as the former. Anyway, the card features the usual blue color so familiar to Albatron products, it has DVI+TVO+DSub outputs and has a decent software package.

Most importantly, the S$225 of the Albatron FX5700P Turbo puts it in the same ball park as a less powerful 9600 Pro. The perfect buy for a penny pinching gamer. Now if money allows, you can buy a inno3D AKA TUL/C+P/Powerolor Radeon 9800 Pro for only S$383 at Bell electronics - same price as a 5900XT for example and only a couple of dollars more than a good 9600XT. BTW, you won't find any inno3D built ATI cards, only nVidia's. The card features an 8x1 architecture with a core speed of 380Mhz and a memory of 680Mhz effectively providing 21.8GB/s of bandwidth. The card itself is covered with a small heat sink fan which shows that corners have somewhat been cut. Also, the memory modules are not covered which means that overclocking might not be as impressive as we would expect from a 9800 Pro. Maximum o'c obtained by hardwarezone was 440MHz/690Mhz for memory. Only 10Mhz o'c. A fine purchase though.