Hard drives as cheap as chips

ABIT DIGIDICE is a product from one of the better known motherboard manufacturers. It is a PC barebone with an Intel P4 motherboard installed. The casing itself is a brushed silver/aluminium one and has a blueish displau as wll as a shuttle dial. In fact, it ressembles more a hi-fi system rather than a barebone. Four buttons are present which allow you to control video, audio photo and copy programs.

Unlike many competitors, this baby is built on a 865G chipset which means that it supports even the recent 800MHz Pentium IV. Two DDR slots are available as well as a Serial ATA-150 controller and one ATA 100 IDE controller. An integrated graphics controller, using shared memory, is embarked based loosely on the old i740. An AC97 5.1 sound card is present as well as a modem and a 10/100 Ethernet port. Two external 5.25in bays and two internal 3.25in bays are available. One PCI slot and one AGP slot make it ideal as a portable gaming computer. A 4-in-1 card reader will suit the budding photographer. Other items on the spec lists include one firewire port, two PS2 ports, one firewire ports, two micrphone inputs and one heaphone output as well as four USB 2.0 ports. Surprisingly, a 200W PSU is provided which means that you will be able to connect more items than in other SFF. A hidden advantage is that it has very good overclocking capabilities thanks to Abit's expertise. Xbit comments - we get an originally looking, pretty barebone-system with rich functionality and expansion capabilities, exceeding those of many similar solutions from other manufacturers. And what if the manufacturer makes the remote control unit a little bit more ergonomic and convenient to use and equips its product with a fully-fledged LCD display? And adds the possibility to program the keys?

Ah, sweet dreams… Well, in this case ABIT DiGiDice could turn out the most attractive solution of the kind. The Abit DigiDice is available here for £152.

Rosewill is not a brand name that you hear often. Still for a technology firm whose name's ressemble more that of a Brazilian film - Rose Wall or an Alien town RosWill, it has a very good line up. It produces memory modules, optical drives, VGA cards, monitors and comptuer casing - a little bit like Kobian/Mercury. The RW9600-256D features an ATI Radeon 9600 clocked at 325MHz with 256MB DDR memory clocked at 400MHz, 128-bit memory channel, D-Sub, S Video and DVI ports. It has four pipelines, is DirectX9 compatible and produces up to 1 Giga texels per seconds. Its price, $95, places it firmly in the powerful yet affordable budget range.

It will tackle all contemporary games with the exception of the newest, with ease at low and medium resolutions. It delivers 1.3Gpixels per and 165.2Mtriangles per sec and is positionned between the 9550 and the 9600pro. It should easily compete with the Geforce FX 5700 plain or LE version. The 256MB memory should make it somewhat more easier to run DOOM III using tweaks available online. Note that that card is not present on the Rosewill's wesbite.

All in all, a good entry level card which will be easy on your pockets and more powerful than all onboard video modules.

Blisscomputers is a well-known second hand PC seller in Singapore. It is selling Dell Optiplex GX110 models for $160. Though it might seem a little bit high, remember that it is the price in Singapore. These ex-corporate computers come with an Intel Pentium III 933MHz, 128MB memory, a 20GB hard disk, floppy, a 40X CDROM, sound module onboard and a NVidia Riva TNT2 with 16MB memory. Also as you might expect, the PC comes with a floppy disk drive, two USB ports and 10/100MB ethernet. There is no operating system or peripheral like a keyboard or a mouse but if you like the sturdiness and the ruggedness of Dell desktop computers, then these base systems would prove perfect for you.

The sweet spot of hard disk capacity, that is where the cost per Gigabyte is lowest, is borned by a 200GB hard disk in France. The Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 - 6Y200PO - cannot be considered as an entry level model due to its capacity and the fact that it has 8MB cache moemry as well as a rotational speed of 7200rpm. At 103,50€, it delivers a superb €0.518 per Gigabyte or less than 30p per Gigabyte. The DM+9 exists both in SATA150 model and in the traditionnal ATA133 model.

It has an average seek time below 9.4ms and a latency below 4.2ms. Using internally developped technologies like Shock Protection System and the Data Protection Systems as well as the Fluid Dynamic Bearing, the DM+9 achieves a level of reliability unknown at this price. Sound output is also at its lowest. The drive is provided as an OEM model. µ