Stuck-on Duron dug up in bargain basement

OUR ATTENTION HAS BEEN DRAWN to a number of outlets offering motherboards for sale with soldered-on Duron processors.

Techwarelabs showed some pix of some such motherboards in a Comdex report filed here. And here are the details of an offering from PC Wave. And, for good measure, here's one from ECS.

This indicates, we'd suggest, some offloading of the chip before it heads off to the knacker's yard. These mobos sport no socket and we note the use of a two-phase power supply which will also reduce costs. Bargaintastic, we say.

Elsewhere in moboland, Hexus.net concentrates on loftier topics with a look at DFI's NB80-EA Granite Bay motherboard. A fine example of an emerging technology, they say, over here.

MBReview has a fiddle with Abit's top i845GE offering, the BG7E, here.

Neoseeker's latest motherboard is the FIC AN19E KT400, which they take a good look at over here.

Meanwhile, Viperlair considers the validity of benchmarks for 3D graphics products over here. Are we just dealing with meaningless numbers, they wonder.

One product that will be benchmarked to billy-o is Nvidia's GeForce FX. How will the FX stand up against ATI's next expected offering - the follow-up to the Radeon 9700 PRO, (codenamed R350), with the likely name, Radeon 9900 - wonder the Firing Squaddies over here.

Tech Report wanders into software territory to suggest that Microsoft's operating systems might actually be reasonable priced, over here.

Hard Tecs 4U have a GeForce4 Ti4200 roundup, including Ti4200 video cards from Leadtek (64MB), MSI (128MB) and Prolink (64MB). Sample the Googled translation over here. Or the untampered with, original German, over here.

OverclockersClubCanada rate the Zalman 300W Switching Power Supply, the ZM300A-APF 300W pretty highly over here.

While Zalman's CNPS5700D-Cu cooler for the Pentium 4, gets a spin over here.

And, thanks to the Internet, the music industry looks like a dinosaur soon to be extinct, suggests an analysis at, er, HardwareAnalysis. It seeks to show how and why record companies will lose if they don't adapt their business model soon. Wibble on over here.

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