ULI 1697 board brings SLI to budget range

THE M1697 chipset goes mainstream. After Asrock, Epox now has build a system around this prodigious little chippy. The 1697-GLi motherboard is tested at Anandtech. With a cheap price, a very good predigreee and the tacit approval of Nvidia for SLI compatibility, then we've got a sure golden winner. The board is SLI compatible thanks to the ULI PowerExpress Engine. The BIOS might not be that stable but with GbE LAN and HD Audio, then Epox has got an ace which should be selling like hot cakes.

Bit Tech wrote an article last week about the Enlight Extreme Gamers PC case. The devil is in the details they say. So that Enlight case must have been living in hell. That Gamers' casing comes with USB card readers and all the necessary ports in the good place. But shame on the paintwork finish and the flimsy plasticky casing door. Fragile it is amd although it is optionally screwless, there is still some more work to be done.

What are the best sub-£100 speaker set out there? Well according to Bios Magazine, the Creative Gigaworks T20 are not far behind. There is no remote and can get a little weak when faced with a large room. Mind you, they're only two way speakers without any bass speakers. Very nice if you do not have too much space on your desk - a simple cable provides with simple installation and Creative's BasXport makes miracles.

Newcomer IT-review has a nice article about a SLI system using Nvidia's 7900GT graphic cards. The GPU runs at 450MHz, which is faster than the 7800GTX, while the memory shoots up at 660MHz. Many are also planning to go much hight than that. SLI almost double the peformance of the cards in most tests and in any scenario, both the X1800XL and the 7800GTX will be beaten on value for money.

Tomshardware tested what appears to be the smallest Windows XP computer, the oqo's model 01+ which is a pintsize mobile PC - no it is not shaped like a tumber and is not made of glass. It is an impressive 420g tablet/laptop which packs a 1GHz Transmeta CPU with 512Mb memory and a 30GB HDD. It is not a powerful device, mind you and the Windows XP Tablet PC edition OS is just fast enough. Plus it is so expensive that the forthcoming Ultra Mobile PC might just kill OQO altogether.

The Logitech Cordless Desktop aka MX5000 laser is under review at hardware central. This is probably the coolest business keyboard around. The bundle includes a Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard and a mouse plus a small transceiver. The mouse itself is a laser type and is a well-crafted piece of pointing device on itself. But it is the keyboard that steals the show with its LCD screen and small things like temperature, your name etc. But that's not all, it also comes with more keys than martians have fingers plus there are a pair of sliders that I'd like to see more on other keyboards. µ