Friday's Daily Hardware buys

If you know of any good value IT sales (auctions, rebates, one-off, clearance, surplus, classified ads) going around in the United Kingdom, France, USA or Singapore, don't hesitate to contact me, at least 24 hours before the sales end.

UK
None sooner had the last dailybuy been published that I received a mail regarding another fine sale from CPUcitystore.co.uk. These lads are selling an AMD Duron CPU for only £10+VAT. This is the cheapest new CPU and definitely beats yesterday's bargain. Granted it is an OEM processor but nothing prevents you from buying a stock HSF, use a socket370 HSF which should be fine or better still, use a passive heat sink because it is a mobile processor consuming only 1.4v and featuring the 32-steps Powernow power saving technology . The Duron 1Ghz was launched back in May 2001, more than three years ago. However, I have absolutely no clue whether it is a Morgan Core, a slightly modified Palomino (better bet)or a newer thoroughbred/applebred core. Power dissipation should not be more than 40w though. Running on a 100Mhz bus, the Duron 1Ghz should be easily overclocked to 1.5Ghz (or more since multiplier is unlocked as well - xbitlabs has achieved 154Mhz FSB with a desktop Duron), roughly equivalent to an AMD XP1800+. Not bad for a £10 CPU. With 64KB L1 cache but only a 128Kb L2 cache, it trashes an equivalent Celeron CPU without breaking a sweat. Well done AMD and CPUCitystore. Now you can just plug it in an Acorp 7A1647A motherboard from Aria and here you are a proud owner of a motherboard/cpu bundle for £19.99+vat. On the other hand, a PC Chips KT266a might be a better bet at £12.99+vat, but with better performance prospects. Grab them while stock lasts. µ

US
Officemax.com is "giving away" through the rebate system, Mad Dog Multimedia Predator 5.1 DSP sound card. The usual price of the card is $22.98. The MDMM Predator is amongst the five best selling cards oin Shopping.com which speaks well for the card quality. It is based on the CMI 8738LX/MX DSP (digital signal processor) and has a six channel DAC, supporting 5.1 speaker set. Moreover, it supports A3D, EAX and directsound3D and has nine onboard connectors. This card is a perfect replacement for an old onboard sound module. The offer excludes shipping and packaging and is valid until the 10th of July.

Singapore
The Microstar MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum has landed in Singapore where it can be found in Corbell retailers shops for less than S$309 (around £99+VAT). Build around the latest Intel i915P/ICH6R chipseet, it supports four dual-channel DDR2 banks. Additionally, it includes a PCI Express expansion slot, three PCI slots, Azalia 7.1 high definition audio (roughly equivalent to a SB live Audigy 2), Intel Matrix RAID storage technology and four IDE and SATA connectors. Have we also mentionned that the Platinum has a PCI-X x16 slot, firewire and a Gbit LAN onboard, that the embarked Active MOS brings you the best thermal solution for Power Circuit and that its V Power provides precise CPU Voltage for stability and overclocking? Other functions included in this superlative motherboards are the D.O.T (Dynamic Overclocking Technology), SafeBIOS, CoreCell Chip (including Speester, BuzzFree, Powerpro and Lifepro) and Meta I/O which provides a full set of external connectors. Lastly, MSI has developped a proprietary card called the Dual-net card which combines 802.11g wireless technology and Bluetooth technology in one. The motherboard is quite crammed while the chipset is covered by a large heatsink which gives you an idea of the amount of heat dissipated and the surface covered is equivalent to the CPU socket itself. µ

France
From the land across the chunnel comes a couple of good deals. For the price of a CDROM drive, one can purchase a CD Writer. A Microstar model is being sold at € 18 (around £11+VAT). It offers 48x read, 48x write and 16x rewrite speeds, with burn proof technology and a large 2 MB cache. It is a refurbished product and carries a three month warrranty. From Chipbuster.com comes another bargain. The Toshiba Protege 3110CT sub notebook (only 4.3lbs and 1.5" thick) is being sold at €250 (around £150+vat). It features a Pentium II 300Mhz, 64Mb memory, 6Gb hard disk, modem, USB connection, integrated sound module and LAN connection, a docking station with more storage and connections option and an external disk drive. This Protege also comes with a 11.3" monitor supporting only SVGA resolution. µ