Monday daily hardware buys

UK
It is hot in high street stores and certainly at Argos. The Samsung Digimax 401 digital camera is a 4MP digital camera on sale at only £84.99, a very low price for such a powerful camera. You won't find anything cheaper even at ebuyer. The camera features a 2272x1704 pixel resolution giving it its 4MP categorization.

At this price though some sacrifices have been made. You won't enjoy an optical zoom for example, it is substituted wotj a 4x optical one. Moreover, the camera comes with 16MB internal memory and a 1.6in LCD screen. It accepts SD/MMC card and allows movie captured to be outputted to TV via the supplied TV output. Video recording as well as still image voice memo is possible. Other features include an optical viewfinder, mult/spot metering, special effects mode as well as multiple flash, picture and white balance settings and dual timer. Software included is Arcsoft Photoimpression.

Still another deal from Morgancomputers is one of the most powerful computers actually on sale in the UK. The T9400 might be on the expensive side at £599.99+VAT but is basically the best value for money at that price. It is powered by an Intel P4 3.4GHz which includes Hyperthreading and obviously a 800MHz FSB. Also in the lot, two 512MB PC3200 memory sticks as two 200GB RAID-O Western Digital Caviar hard disks.

These are 7200rpm hard drives with 2MB buffers each and an excellent average read seek time of 9ms and should make your operating system fly as well as providing with ample storage for your movies and MP3 songs. The motherboard used is a Trigem 865PE which comes with the Intel's i865 high performing chipset and supports two memory slots. Since it is in a microATX format, you also get one AGP slot - occupied by one MSI Geforce FX 5700 graphics card - mind you it is not an LE one since it coems with a 128-bit memeory interface and 256MB DDR memory running at 450MHz - and three PCI slots.

Four IDE devices as well as two SATA ones can be connected. Onboard peripherals include eight USB 2.0 ports and two Firewire ones, onboard sound module from Realtek, the ALC655 which supports 6 channel, onboard LAN from the same manufacturer, the 8110s which is apparently a Gigabit LAN module as a Wireless LAN courtesy of Asus, the WL-138G which will transmit your information at up to 54Mb/s thanks to the 802.11g protocol.

Other interesting features include a Liteon 8x DVD writer, a 16x DVDROM, an integrated USB 7-in-1 card reader, two stereo speakers, one Connexant analog modem, the floppy disk drive, one multimedia keyboard with its optical mouse and last and certainly not least an Avermedia FM/TV tuner with remote control which on its own should cost no less than £40. The system comes with Windows XP and MS works as well as one year warranty. Overall an exciting deal.

US
Thanks to Ed for this one. Compusa is selling a 1GB Lexar CompactFlash memory card running at 4X for only £59.99 after two rebates. For the same price, you can get a 1GB Secure Digital Card from the same place and from the same manufacturer. The card comes with lock-on capabilities as well as five year warranty. But that's not all, CompUSA is also selling a gigantic 160GB hard disk drive for $59.99 after $80 rebate. The Deskstar - not deathstar - still sports a PATA interface together with a rotational speed of 7200rpm and a 2MB cache. Very much what you would expect for a hard disk of this price except that the 160GB size is unseen at that level. Grab it while you can here.

Singapore
CASH (Computer Ambience System Warehouse) is selling a 200GB MDT - Magnetic Date Tech - hard disk for a mere S$185, less than $60. The MDT brand might not be well known. Let's just say that these guys refurbish top brand hard disk drives and resell them at a cheaper price. MDT reassembles hard drives using components outsourced from major brand hard drive manufactures ie. WD, Maxtor and Seagate. By stamping on the OEM brand MDT they are able to pass on a substantial savings of 35-40% to equivalent brand name manufacturers. All MDT hard disks offer a 1 year limited replacement warranty and the savings should allow you to purchase two of them and RAID1ed the couple for even more reliability. The MDT 200GB comes with a 8MB cache and a 7200rpm rotational speed. It is most likely to be a Hitachi Deskstar. µ