Foxconn mobos and cheap AGP 6600GTs

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.

An update on one of yesterday's daily buys which was a seventeen rather than a seven pages per minute printer. James sent us the following mail. "The Samsung 1740 printer you mentionned yesterday is a very nice printer. But when you say it's not GDI; because it will work with Linux, that's not actually the case. Samsung made a GDI driver available some time back under an Open Source license, which got integrated into most Linux distributions. It Just Works, but it does use the local CPU (not much: it gets along fine on a Celeron 433). Linuxprinting hasn't been upgraded with the 1740 data, but everything else is accurate.

UK
What's the cheapest nVidia 6600GT graphics card that money can't buy? Right now, you can get a Gigabyte GV-N6T128D stuck with an AGP - with the help of a HSI bridge - for less than £109+VAT at Dabs. In comparison, for that price, you would normally get a last generation Geforce 5900XT.

Actually, it is easier to get these in the market. The advantage of the 6600GT over other similar priced cards is not only its great performance but also the fact that it can be used in pairs in SLI mode if PCI-e models are used. Obviously, this is not our concern right now. The card uses a standard golden HSF which covers only the GPU and not the memory. The card has eight pixel pipelines and three vertex shader units128-bit 128MB DDR3 memory with a DSub, a DVI and a TVO as well as the ability to Multiview. Gigabyte also bundles PowerDVD 5.0 and V-Tuner II.

The AGP version is slightly slower than the PCI Express counterpart witht the default speed being 500MHz/900MHz and can be overclocked to 589MHz/1180MHz for the core/clock respectively. The card is probably the best at its price, it handily beats the X700Pro, its most direct competitor - whicfh is not available in AGP format for now, as well as the 9800 Pro or the 5950 Ultra. In 3Dmark 2005 for example, the 6600GT is twice as fast as the latter.

In addition, it needs an external power source as do its older brothers. The only thing that you should take care of is the quality of your power supply. Just make sure it is good enouigh to handle that card. Guru3D gave its editors' choice saying: "There's nothing much to argue about is there? The GeForce 6600 series offers astoundingly good value for your money. The GT versions bring you a little bit more of a complementary experience over the generic 6600. In the end the 6600 GT is the best product to buy in the mid-range segment of the graphics market as it is today."

USA
The Samsung SCX4100 is dubbed a digital productivity center by Samsung. It is on sale at $99 at buy.com after a $50 rebate, half its street price. The SCX-4100 has a 15 pages per minute engine with a 600x600 resolution, thanks to its 66MHz processor. Enough for any small/medium offices. PC Magazine found out back in January 2004 that the print quality ofthe printer was short of being excellent with most small fonts - five points - readable.

At this price, the SCX4100 also include a scanner which allows the whole thing to be used as a photocopier. It has a 10,000 pages monthly duty-cycle Low-cost printing per black and white page and standalone copying with exceptional print quality on plain paper. A more affordable and superior alternative to inkjet models, the SCX-4100 offers users the ability to produce black and white copies at a fraction of the cost of coin-operated machines in libraries and copy centers. It also includes 4800-dpi color scanning capabilities.

When it comes to paper handling, the SCX-4100 is equipped to manage a variety of paper sizes and types including card stock, envelopes and transparencies with its 250-sheet standard cassette and alternate bypass feeder. With its up to 15-ppm black & white print engine and copy speed, the SCX-4100 produces durable, long lasting output that is smudge and water resistant and razor sharp with its 8MB of memory and 600-dpi resolution.

Two users can also print simultaneously on the SCX-4100 on utilizing a built-in first-in-first-out (FIFO) multiport sensing feature optimizing the use of the USB and parallel interfaces. As a standalone copier, the SCX-4100 offers reduction and enlargement rates of 50 percent to 200 percent and the ability to produce up to 99 copies. It is ideal for copying printed documents and incorporates several advanced features such as Auto-fit Copy which allows any size image to fill an entire page; Clone Copy to reproduce a single image multiple times onto one sheet; ID card copy which enables users to copy the front and back of identification cards onto the front of one document; and black and white Poster printing.

With the SCX-4100, color prints can easily be scanned to the PC for easy sharing, Web site publishing and e-mailing of photos and documents. Samsung SmarThru software makes it easy to scan-to-file, scan-to-application and scan-to-email. With Optical Character Recognition (OCR), originals can also be scanned and transformed into text files for editing.

Singapore
Hardwareplace is selling a Foxconn 661FX4 motherboard for only S$85, around £25+VAT, that's a very cheap price to pay for a Pentium 4 motherboard. Foxconn might well be a new name on the motherboard market but it has been in the computer related market since more than 30 years now. It delves in everything from motherboards to notebooks and graphic cards. The 661FX4 is a mATX format motherboard . It is based on the SIS 661FX chipset.

The latter supports the latest socket 478 processors with Hyperthreading and 800MHz FSB. It has an integrated 256-bit 3D graphic engine with 2 pixel rendering pipelines and four texture units per cycle - interestingly, it is Direct X9 compliant though its 200MHz core speed will not make it a winner. The 661FX also integrates the Ultra-AGP II technology which essentially increases the bandwidth available when used with DDR400 memory. Other notable features include the availability of a 8X AGP slot, three PCI slots, two DDR sockets and two PATA connectors. On top of that there are six USB 2.0 ports, an integrated six channel audio module and 10/100 Ethernet LAN. No fancy RAID or S-ATA ports here. Overclocking is not the board strong point however but even then Adrenaline Vault managed an interesting 10% increase. µ

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