Tadpole spawn has Via legs

A SECOND ENTRY IN OUR WEEKLY hardware roundup, this one coming a day or two after the last one. I have to work out the timing a bit better.

The first entry is from Kingston, which jumps into the ultra-low latency DDR arena with the launch of a module in the HyperX line. It is a 512MB stick that runs at DDR-400 with timings of 2-2-2-5-1. They retail for $179, or if you buy the 1GB kit, you save $2, they cost $356. No word if you save $2 more with four sticks.

The next one up is Tadpole again. Rather than waiting a month to report on its laptops, I am going to be a mere day late this time. Tadpole announced the Talin 12 notebook, an ultra-portable model, and one not based on a SPARC chip.

The Talin12 models, the 100 and the 120, are 12.1 inch, 3 pound, 802.11b equipped notebooks. One, the 120, is based on LV P-M, and fits neatly into the 'nothing new under the sun' niche. The other, the 100 is different, based on a VIA C3 running at 1GHz. That one is definitely different.

Staying on the different track, the Talin12 comes with Windows pre-installed, and also comes with a dual boot SuSE configuration. To top off the different claim, it has the Java Desktop System installed, and Staroffice 7.0 on the Windows side.

Next up is BOXX Technologies. If you are in the mood for a workstation with Dual Xeon 3.4s, 2GB or RAM, a Quadro, and a bunch of other fixings, you are in luck. If you don't want to pay for this $5,275 workstation, you are really in luck, because BOXX is giving one away for free. Sign up here.

In the continued vein of giving stuff away, we come to Gigabyte. It has a flash game to play called Maze Challenge, and there are a bunch of worthwhile prizes to win. It is all to celebrate the "8" Sigma motherboard line. You can read all about it, and play the game here.

Sticking with motherboards, we come to Abit's OTES Aeroflow. This basically means that Abit mounted the fan on the north bridge to pull air across the NB heatsink horizontally. To make matters more interesting, it pointed the exhaust so the moving air cools other parts of said mobo as well. Simple idea, but a potentially great one.

Last up is Opera. Opera announced that it is coming out with new setups to ease migration away from IE and other browsers. These setups are basically skins, toolbars, keymappings and menus that emulate the feel of IE, Firefox or Safari. It is an interesting idea, and you can find it here. µ