Hardware Buyalert from Asia

TO SINGAPORE we go for this buyalert. Creative Labs is selling a bundle comprising of the Audigy 2 ZS, the Inspire T7700 and a Steering wheel for only S$370 ($218, £119). Is that a deal? Certainly yes, if you take into consideration that this particular bundle would cost around £180 in UK.

The Sound blaster Audigy 2 ZS is one of the very few sound cards to support EAX 4.0 THX, Dolby DTS and ES and 8 speakers. Connectivity is no problem as it boosts 11 ports including 1 firewire. Apart from Creative's usual software, you will get Lara Croft Angel of Darkness and Tom Clancy's Rainbow. As for the Inspire T7700, it is a 8-piece speaker set featuring five 8w satellite speakers and 3 front speakers. Combined with the ZS, it delivers the ultimate sound available for home cinema and demanding users. It is uniquely compatible with the new range of MuVO mp3 players from Creative Labs.

Guru3D has this to say on the ZS "for the hardcore the Audigy2 ZS is the definitive sound card for games. It literally crushed the competition, most dramatically with the UT2004 Demo by running 15 to 20FPS faster. In Call of Duty, sound placement with EAX 3.0 was perfect, and it outran the Prodigy 7.1 by a good 12%. That's pretty dramatic. For those that do, the Audigy2 ZS is a spectacular complement for a fast machine" while on the Inspire 7700, it says that "You'll get decent enough sound plus a 7.1 experience that is just fantastic to experience".

Our good friends at hardwareplace are selling an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with an Asrock K7S41GX motherboard bundle for just S$ 195 (£63, $115). A similar offer in UK would cost around £70. The asrock motherboard features asrock patented U-COP which deals with overheating and hybrid booster which is a safe overclocking feature. It features the SIS741GX chipset with an onboard Real 256E graphics onboard which can be slightly overclocked. In fact, it is a SIS315 in disguise with up to 64Mb shareable memory. Though It is a MicroATX board, it still is able to bring in an 8X AGP port, 2 PCI slots and 1 AMR. Video, Lan, Sound are all integrated and the SIS741GX seems to be a rather good overclocker with up to 25% gains recorded. Make sure to flash your bios with the latest update available here

Not to be outdone, Bell proposes a Gigabyte K8VT800 Athlon64 motherboard and a boxed Athlon 64 2800+ for only S$507 ($299, £163). The K8VT800 is powered by the VIA K8T800 chipset and integrates sound and Lan. It has 3 DDR memory slots, 2 serial ATA connectors and 2 IDE connectors together with an AGP8x graphic slot and 5 PCI slots. The product page is available here. As it is usually the case for low priced components, no online review are available for this product. As for the Athlon64 2800+ based on the Newcastle core, GamePC has this to say: "The performance of the Athlon64 2800+ is impressive for an entry level processor - as despite its lower clock speed (and AMD PR / Quantispeed / Whatever rating) in comparison to the Athlon XP line, the A64 2800+ easily bests even the fastest Athlon XP chips in modern games". No need to say more!

Finally, for those who crave for a dual processr rig, Cybermind is currently offering a Tyan Tiger MPX S2466N, two Athlon MP2800+, 512MB of PC2100 Reg ECC memory and a Topower 370W PSU for S$ 1629 ($960, £524). The Tyan tiger features the 760MPX chipset which dates back from two years already but still is a worthy competitor. It does support up to 4Gb memory and has two 64-bit PCI slot and loads of charm. As for the Athlon MP2800+, the fine words come from GamePC again which says that the Athlon MP 2800+ can deliver great workstation performance and can deliver fantastic performance for the price. Coupling all of them all together cetainly gives to even the latest Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 EE a run for its money. Tyan's motherboard page is available here

If you do know about any special offers in any country, please let me know.