Tuesday's Hardware Buyers Guide

UK
Chaintech board bundles are back at Valuelist.co.uk. The UK based surplus reseller has only a dozen of those at £43.88+vat complete with a one-year warranty. The bundle is made up of a Chaintech 7KJD and an AMD Duron 1800Mhz. The former is based on a KT266a chipset and therefore is a little dated in terms of functionality. It does however offer two DIMM sockets, a 5+1+1 slot configuration with a proprietary slot for Chaintech but with only two USB ports. Apart from that, you get the usual AC97 codec sound module integrated. The AMD Duron 1800Mhz is the last member of that family, soon to be superseeded by the Sempr0n batch. This second generation AMD Duron features 133Mhz FSB, 256Kb cache and is based on the newer Applebred core with 130nm process (as compared to the older Palomino core). Hence overclocking this little baby should be easy provided that the Chaintech mobo allows it.

Further down the ladder, for even more cost-conscious buyers, valuelist is selling a Jetway combo featuring the VIA C3 800Mhz processor (at £30.98+VAT) which is equivalent to an Intel Celeron 633Mhz. It has a 133Mhz, onboard sound, video (sharing up to 64Mb memory) and LAN, all controlled by a SIS630 chipset.

Surprisingly, it still has four PCI slots, two DDR memory banks, six channel sound module and six USB 2.0 ports. All this crammed in a Micro ATX form factor. µ

USA
From saveateagle.com, we have one lovely notebook from Averatec at $679 (roughly £385+VAT). If style could kill, this would be a serial murderer. Under the hood, it has an Intel Mobile Celeron 1.33Ghz laptop (with a 133Mhz bus and 256Kb L2 Cache), the Sotec 3120V. Very light (4.4 Lbs), sturdy (magnesium alloy casing), small (slightly less than a letter format) and thin (1.3" only), it will prove to be the ideal laptop for those on the move, easily replacing a Pentium III desktop computer. Other worthy components include a 12.1" XGA LCD display with 256Mb memory, a DVD reader, a 30Gb hard disk, a modem and a network card. The chipset is a SIS630ST and allows up to 32Mb memory to be shared. Moreover, the Sotec 3120V has three USB ports, Windows XP home as operating system, one PCMCIA slot and some sound sockets as well as Dual Video Output. It is a new laptop with one year warranty. Bear in mind though that it does not come with a floppy disk drive or with a carrying case. However, you can purchase a USB disk for peanuts. You can expect at least two and a half hours of continuous use with the 4000 mAh battery bundled. µ

France
Ldlc.fr has a very interesting Cube SFF mini PC on sale. The Pointmax Cubeline S668SL P4 costs only € 149 (around £85+vat). It is a barebone with looks. It ressembles a shoebox in plexiglas. with 2 USB2.0 in front as well as audio ports. This german product which seems to be an OEM for a well known taiwanese company is a P4 compatible SFF. It features an intel i845G chipset, one mini PCI slot, two DIMM socket, Northwood only compatibility, integrated everything (sound, video, audio, lan). Even though the box is quite large and spacious, the motherboard chosen, a mini-atx, is surprisingly small, occupying only a fraction of the space. It seems to have been so as to reduce noise. But can it be achieved with a normal Pentium 4 and its HSF? µ

Singapore
Hardwarezone.com, the virtual gateway to IT singapore has a very interesting classified ads section which provides with loads of very interesting buys, even more interesting than Ebay Singapore for example. Someone is selling an AMD system (w/o monitor, keyboard or mouse) powered by an Athlon XP thoroughbred running at 1700Mhz (FSB200Mhz x 8.5), roughly equivalent powerwise to an Athlon XP 2500+. The motherboard used is an Abit NF7-S with an nForce chipset, SATA RAID, 5.1 channel Soundstorm audio, Firewire, six USB 2.0 ports, two 256MB Kingston memory. As graphics card, a lowly Radeon 7000 with 64Mb memory which can obviously be upgraded. Next on the list, two Western Digital Hard disks running in RAID0. Even though they are only 20.5Gb in size, they spin at 7200rpm and should provide you with the necessary oomph. The rest of the rig is pretty standard with a BTC CDRW, an aluminium mid tower with a small 300W psu and a floppy. The price though is very cool though at only S$ 470, which corresponds to £127+VAT. The computer is in mint condition, cared for by a real geeker. µ