PC, digicam and the rest - all cheap

UK
Tiny has a powerful bundle available for under £500 inc. VAT. At £499, the Home Office 3200 is perfect for .... the home. It features the Intel Celeron D 320 with the new Prescott Core and a higher FSB. As mentionned previously, the Celeron D is more like a Willamette Pentium IV rather than a cut down Celeron. It also has 256MB DDR memory, a 80GB hard disk and quite surprisingly at this price, a 8x Dual format DVD Writer.

Some corners though are cut as the Home Office 3200 has integrated graphics. The motherboard used, a Microstar MSI 6787 features a PM266 chipset with two free PCI slots - one occupied by a 56K modem, an AGP port and one free CNR slot. Connectors present are five USB 2.0 ports and one ethernet port. But that's not all. The Home Office 3200 comes with a large 17in CRT monitor, a Lexmark X1180 All in One inkjet printer which features a photocopier using the scanner and the printer. Plus you also have a USB game pad - like the ye old ones you played with in your youth and ten games. If you are lucky enough to be amongst the first 800 orders, you will be given an Opus 4000 digital camera which comes with a 4MP output, 4x digital zoom, a flash, SD/MMC compatible zoom and a 1.5in TFT screen.

The Tiny Home Office 3200 comes with a 250W power supply. Sound is provided by an onboard VIA AC97 audio chipset but strangely only two desktop speakers are provided. Finally the Home Office 3200 comes with a Windows XP Home, Works v7, a trial version of MS Office 2003 and Cyberlink Power suites.

USA
You will be hard pressed to find a Sony digital camera that cheap. At Datavision, the Cybershot DSC-P41 is on sale for only $164.99, that's slightly more than £91, for a camera launched at the beginning of the year. And Sony has not cut any visible corner on that particular product. It features a 4.1 MP effective i.e non-interpolated Super HAD - Hole Accumulation Diode - CCD with a 3x digital zoom - no optical zoom her. That CCD allows more light to pass through each pixel increasing sensitivity and reducing noise.

The DSC-P41 has the sam sleek body as its other camarades with the same front and back look. Watch for the large 1.5in 67K pixels LCD screen and for user-friendly buttons and control. The P41 features other intelligent auto-focus and auto-exposure systems. Also worthy noting is the Real Imaging processor circuit which should normally allow you to take up to 400 shots before recharging.

This claim as usual has given rise to a number of contradictory comments on the web. The new processor also allows capturing video clips at VGA resolution and speed - much above SVHS quality and at 30FPS. The camera comes with rechargeable batteries and power charger as well as a 16MB memory stick. The only Windows software provided though is the Picture Package for Sony imaging soft.

France
The Geforce FX 5900 is now firmly installed in the mid-range after being superceded by the Geforce 6XXX family. For sheer value though, you can hardly beat the Asus V9950 Gamer Edition sold by Grosbill for a paltry Eur 149 - although Monsieurprix mentions that the price of the card will be sold for a lower price at Eur 129. Admittedly, there are some reasons why the card is sold at a slightly lower price.

It has a slower core/memory speed at 400MHz/700MHz instead of the usual 400/800MHz but makes it up by its robust quality and first-class manufacturing. Also included is a superb software package - Black Hawk Down, Battle Engine Aquila, Gun Metal, 6-in-1 Game Pack, ASUS DVD-XP, and ASUS Utilities and Driver CD, all of which should make you happy. Although it is not sure that the same package will be provided in the card package sold by Grosbill. Also worthy noting is the fact that the card is an excellent overlclocker reaching 475MHz and 730MHz respectively in core and memory speeds.

The memory used is a 2.8ns rather than the usual 2.2ns ones, which expain the low overclocking performance. Other noteworthy specs include a 256bit memory interface and the presence of VGA, TVO and DVI connectors. CDRinfo was impressed by this card and says that it should be named Overclocker edition than Gamer edition.

Singapore
Prices have fallen like dead leaves for already obsolete Athlon XP series. If you do not to pay trhough the nostrils for an AMD Athlon 64 bundle, then you can hopefuly go for a good mid-range motherboard bundle. The Abit KV7 on sale at Bell does represent a fairly good deal especially when coupled with an Athlon XP 2600+. The KV7 has what HardOCP describes as a near perfect layout, with the KT600 chipset on top of the specs list. it also has Vcore, Vagp, Vmem and Vchipset tunings.

The KV7 uses VIA's VT1616 audio codec which apparently offers a much better sound than realtek's solution. Also onboad is the VIA VT6103 LAN chip. Other IO ports include SPDIF ports, four USB ports and the usual Audio ports. The KV7 also supports RAID SATA natively thanks to VIa's VT8237 south bridge. Although the setup is fairly rudimentary, it will give a performance boost especially is you want to bypass Windows XP software RAID implementation. it does not overclock well though especially when compared with the nForce2 family. Even then the price seems to be right at only S$274, less than £80+VAT.