Daily cheap hardware bargains

US
The Palmone Tungsten is amongst the better colour budget PDAs available. At $149 after rebates at Officedepot.com. It will get some people upgrading their old Palm Vx.. Officedepot is giving a free aluminium hard case which has also a smotth lining with two pockets for storing expansion cards. In the package you also get a data synchronisation cable, a rechargeable li-ion battery, Palm OS 5.2.1 and Palm desktop v4.1. Although it is made of plastic the Tungsten E does feel sturdy and durable. Palm has stuck to the same award winning design throughout its range. Easy to grasp controls, friendly interface, fingers falling where they should.

The Tungsten E is powered by a 126MHz Texas Instruments processor which should be enough for most casual tasks except perhaps gaming. The PDA also has 32MB memory inbuilt plus a SD/MMC slot for memory cards. It also has a high resolution 320x320 transflective color display which rates amongst the best in its category. It doesn't have integrated WiFi, voice recorder, Bluetooth or camera but frankly at that price, who cares? Software package is what most people would expect with an organizer, Real One Mobile Player, kinoma player and producer, Documents To Go Professional Edition.

As you can guess, the PDA can be used as an MP3 and MPEG player. In fact, with the wide availability of cheap SD cards, you can easily get soem pretty good storage facilities. For example Ecost has a 256MB SD card for only $9 after rebates. I don't know if the price is valid for one order per person only. Else nothing prevents you from getting four cards = 1GB for $36.

Don't forget that the SD slot also allows other upgrades such as a digital camera or a WiFi module to be plugged in. CNet noted that battery life was more than decent and should last about a week in moderate use but there is no way of replacing it with a higher capacity or a second battery. PDA buyers guide says that this model is substantially better than the Sony's TJ25, its immediate competitor and most online reviews agree that it is a snap and a real bargain at that price.

UK
Asrock is gradually building its own little place in the motherboard kingdom. As a minnow brother to Asus, this company has introduced many classy products such as the K7S8X and the likes. A little known company, SpotonUK, is selling one of the latest, and probably, the most curious motherboard from Asrock. The Asrock K8 Combo-Z M1689 is quite different from others Athlon64 motherboards. Firstly, it is powered by the ULI M1689 chipset which is an integrated single chip.

And ULI is not a brand you hear everyday do you. Secondly, it has two sockets, a Socket 754 and a Socket 939 onboard, allowing you to buy a cheap Sempron 3100+ for example and then when prices allow, get yourself a socket 939 Athlon 4000+ later on. Obviously, you cannot connect two CPU at the same time. This is NOT a dual processor board. Also you will find five DIMM slots on there, two for the socket 754 CPU and three for the socket 939 CPU. Dual channel technology is supported by the socket 939 CPU which is a good thing actually. You also have one AGP and three PCI slots, a Realtek 850 audio codec supporting 7.1 channels as well as the ubiquitous 10/100MBps Ethernet port. Other storage connectors include two ATA connectors supporting four IDE devices as well as two SATA connectors supporting RAID 0, 1 and JBOD.

The list goes on with six USB 2.0 ports - but curiously it seems, not SPDIF IO as well as a slew of overclocking friendly technology known as the Hybrid Booster where you get CPU Frequency Stepless control, CPU Multiplier, ASRock U-COP, Boot Failure Guard. Overclocking therefore is a doable thing on the board. Unfortunately and surprisingly, apart from ocworbench.com, there is no other review of this out-of this world motherboard. Performance is on par or slightly better than many entry level 754 and more expensive s939. Incidentally also, it is the cheapest socket 939 motherboard in the UK and by a substantial margin at £45+VAT. Tomorrow, we'll see an even more exotic configuration.

Singapore
The guys from Videopro have in stock one of the more powerful AIW video cards, The Sapphire AIW 9800 Pro for a mere S$ 859. The video card is build around the R350, which is etched using a 150nm silicon process and hass 107 million transistors. Technologically, it has a 256-bit memory interface and a 8x1 pipeline configuration. Apart from being a very quick graphic card, which was only challenged recently by the Radeon X800 and the 68XX series. Its core and memory clock is 380/340Mhz and it can deliver a bandwidth of 21.8Gb/s. it is worth noting that some Radeon AIW uses 2.5ns memory modules instead of the 2.8ns, which means normally that they can be overclocked more eficiently. The number of IO ports on the card is simply awesome.

AVout, AVin, DVI, AV-in ports, DSub etc. You also have the well known Philips TV tuner - with 125 channel capabilities and is stereo enabled - as well as the Theater 200 chip which is the master of all trade chip allowing you to capture movies from various inputs. On top of that, a RF wireless remote control allows you to control your card from a distance of up to 10m. The onboard tuner comes with some new tricks like TV on Demand, The Gemstar Guide Plus+ in the american version, Transluscent THruview, Eazylook and MulTView which allows Picture in Picture via its twin TV tuner. Yes you also are provided with the now legendary blue break out box which provides you with even more extensions. And it overclocks well as you will see in most reviews.

Last and not least, until the X800 AIW comes out in retail, the AIW 9800 Pro will remain the most powerful AIW available. Note however, this Sapphire version comes with the RF remote optional and the memory modules are not covered with any form of sink which might hamper overclocking. µ