Monday daily hardware buys

IF YOU know of any good value IT sales (auctions, rebates, one-off, clearance, surplus, classified ads) going around in the United Kingdom, France, USA or Singapore, don't hesitate to contact me, at least 24 hours before the sales end.

First, a reader's feedback concerning the Medion MD8383 mini review that we had some days ago. The reader is Edwin Groenendijk, who owns a website dedicated to supermarket IT deals.

"I run a website with lots of information on the MD8383. The latest news is a major defect in virtually ALL of them. It is the CPU cooler which does not function correctly, due to poor contact between processor and cooler. As a result, the processor starts to overheat way too fast, say when playing a simple game or watching TV. The CPU will try to cool down by fully deploying the processor-fan, which then produces a whining noise of 54 dB. Some unfortunate buyers had to return a PC that simply would not produce any result other than a loud noise. Some claim to have fixed the problem by rotating the cooler 90°. There are a lot of complaints of extremely noisy aldi PC's these days, and I hope the UK costumers may benifit of the conclusions we already made in Holland and Belgium."

USA
PC Club

is giving away some more mini-hubs. The Justcom 4 port hub is a USB 2.0 version with a funky squarish form. The ports are on the four sides. As with many cheapo USB hub, the length of the connecting wire provided is simply ridiculous, probably no more than 20cm. But for something free, you cannot go wrong. The price before Mail In Rebate was $9.99. Be aware though that a "An unknown device has exceeded the current limits of it's hub port" message might welcome you when you first plug in this hub. This means that you are plugging it from a port that does not provide enough current.
Media veteran Meritline

is giving away packs of 50-blank CDR media which are free after the $9 rebate. These ARITA branded media support up to 48x and have a media capacity of 650MB. ARITA is certified under QS 9000 and each CD-R has to pass multiple quality control tests before it is released, making it the most reliable optical data storage media. ARITA CD-R Media has achieved excellent environmental tests under high temperature and high humidity. After acceleration aging test, ARITA CD-R shows stable error ratio over 1,000 hours which is of the same class more than 100 years storage under room condition. For your information, the dye used is Advanced Phthalocyanine.

UK
Morgancomputers

have got another cracking deal. This one should not last that long as well. They are selling a Plextor DVD writer, the PX-504A, for only £19.99+VAT. It is actually an OEMed NEC 1100A drive. The fact that it is their second such deal means that more is perhaps to come. Also worth noting is that this Plextor and their previous offer from Aopen were both DVD+R only drives. Does that indicate that the industry is heading towards a particular format? Unlike the Aopen deal, the Plextor PX-504A comes as a retail product. As most of our readers do know, Plextor is the Rolls of Writers. This one comes with one year warranty and is supplied with Nero burning software, InCD packaet writing software, Pinnacle Studio, Power DVD and Plextools CD Utility software. You also get some media as well as fitting kit. As for the features, the drive can write DVD+R at 4x, DVD+RW at 2.4x, CDR and CDRW at 16x and 10x respectively. It has a 2MB buffer and includes buffer underrun and lossless linking technologies. GamePC's concluding views about that drive are "In terms of performance and features, the Plextor 504A has certainly not blown us away, but has given respectable performance in all areas. It works great as a base CD-R/CD-RW unit, plays DVD movies great, and gives decent read times for both CD and DVD data discs." Zap it while you can.

Singapore
Cybermind is selling Singapore's cheapest Radeon 9800. Ar S$299, the Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 seems to be a pretty good bargain. However, there is more than what meets the eye. The model on sale is almost certainly the Athlantis 9800 Lite which features 128-bit memory interface as compared to the usual 256-bit. That particular card had given rise to a number of complaints about the obvious confusion that was created when Sapphire named that card 9800 Pro. Based on the R350, the 9800 Lite is built using a 150nm process and has a 8x1 pipeline architecture. The 128MB memory run at 290MHz, substantially slower compared to the 340MHz of its elder 9800 Pro brother. The same applies to the GPU which runs at 325MHz compared to 380MHz on the real thing. The result is that you get something that will be better than a 9600XT but probably end worse than a Geforce FX 5900. Fortunately, that special version of the Sapphire Radeon 9800 Lite has not apparently reached European shores - except if you are an Ebayer.