Your Monday Hardware Buys

USA
Mwave.com is currently selling a nForce 250 motherboard from Chaintech for less than $70 (around £32+VAT), the VNF3-250 ZENITH and presented as the first Zenith Value Edition Motherboard. Note that it is not the lower end version featurting the nforce 150 cheapset but its better endowed brother. Furthermore, Mwave is not giving out the lower version of this motherboard, the ZNF3-250 but the slightly improved VN one. The latter is a black ATX board with five PCI and three DIMM slots as well as a CMR slot which houses the external 5.1 SPDIF enabled sound card riser from Chaintech. Other goodies include twin SATA and PATA ports (with RAID 0/1 support), six USB2.0 ports and a Realtek controlled LAN module. Nothing really outstanding but bear in mind that its price is nothing short of breathtaking. Also very worthy noting is the fact that this board boasts the full overclocking capabilities that is found into much more expensive socket 754 boards.0.025v increments for core voltage whereas DRAM, AGP and chipset voltage are increamented in 0.1v. BUS and PCI speeds are incrementable in steps on 1 Mhz. Grab this board from Mwave.com while it is still available and see for yourself while this board earned itself a Silver Editors Choice from Anandtech. Sheesh kebab! µ

UK
A SCSI card together with a hard disk does not cost you the earth and can bring some hefty improvement to your computer since the hard disk is the next slowest component of any PC (the first one being the human being). We found a SCSI card at bigpockets.co.uk for only £9.99 with VAT. It is a CMC Powerport 3194 uPlus card and was apparently sold almost solely in UK. How Bigpockets managed to get a batch of new cards at such a price is not known. Basically, it is a single chip Ultra SCSI 32Bit PCI host adapter with a 1MB Flash ROM. CMC is an OEM for D-link, the network specialists and therefore should provide with fairly good performance. The German version of PC magazine gave it a "good" when compared to fifteen other SCSI cards. Next we head to ebay.co.uk for a used SCSI hard disk. Of particular interest to me is a Cheetah SCSI hard disk, the ST118202LC, which is a 18GB hard disk, a rotational speed of 10000 RPM and an access time of 6MS. Now for those who want to do it really hard, why not go for a RAID 0 configuration using these hard disks. At £9.99+vat per unit, they are really cheap. So let's recap, for around thirty quid, you can get 36GB of RAID-0 UWSCSI hard space spinning at 10,000 RPM with an SCSI card. You can choose to go for a secondary much larger ATA backup but for sure you won't be able to beat this SCSI array for the price.. Enjoy. µ

Singapore
Heading for the Country-City, Videopro.com.sg, one of the larger retailers has a snappy notebook or rather a desknote on sale. The desknote A901 features an Intel celeron 1100Mhz with a SIS630ST chipset with built in graphics (SIS300 anyone?), up to 64Mb shared memory, TVO capabilities, a Realtek Lan Chip, 128Mb SDRAM memory, a 10GB hard disk, four USB connectors, a 24x CDROM, a modem, a 14" LCD screen and most importantly an alternative OS, thizlinux which is an Asian distro. The whole package retails for only S$1399 (around £377+vat). Not that much for a laptop in Singapore. Unfortunately, our enthusiam is dampened by the lack of floppy and most importantly the absence of batteries to make it truly mobile... CNET has review of it and is less than happy with it. The sorry fact is that you get what you pay for. µ

Reunion
1000ordi.fr is selling ATI's latest version GPU for cheap. The Sapphire Atlantis Radeon X800 Pro /256 is currently retailing at € 429 (roughly £ 241, much less than what its price in UK). With 256Mb GDDR3 memory running at 450Mhz and a 475Mhz R420 GPU, the Sapphire Atlantis runs ahead of the pack at this price, beating the ex-champion, the 9800XT by a full 50% in some tests. With 160 millions transistors under the hood and a 130nm process, it is comparable to a second generation Pentium 4 processor. Furthermore, it has two 400Mhz DAC with two DVI and one TVO ports. Overclocking is quite good with 10% increase a common feat. Lastly, the card can be soft modded to a X800XT using The SPIRIT driver which is available on 3dchips-fr.com forums. µ