Friday Daily Hardware buys

FIRST LET'S GO to dabs.com where these lads are selling blank DVD-r for the cheap. 100 of these flying saucers for only £16 inc. VAT, now that is what I call cheap, especially when you see that some outlets sell CD-R for more than that. They are premium unbranded Silver DVD-R 2x is manufactured by Interaxia and offers 4.7GB of storage capacity. It conforms to all the DVD specifications for DVD-R (DVD Recordable), ensuring maximum compatibility and superb reliability. Reviews on Dabs website show that they are absolutely fantastic value for money.

To burn the DVDs, why not invest in a cheap 8X Dual Format DVD writer. The Nec ND2500A would perfectly fit the bill at £40.66+vat (available at ebuyer). OEM is no problem, you might not get a cable (ask one from your geek friend) and for your software, try CDburner XP Pro, a freeware burning software. It is better than some paid-for software and will even optimise your burning time according to the media used. As for the ND2500A, it saves to DVD recordables at 8x speed (+R as well as -R) and writes DVD rewritables at 4x speed (+RW as well as -RW). In addition to DVD, the unit also records to CD media: CD-R at 32x and ultra-speed CD-RW at 16x speed. The unit's reading speed is impressive as well: 12x for DVD-ROM and 40x for CD-ROM in combination with access time of 140 ms for DVDs and 120 ms for CDs. An hour of DVD video can be recorded in less than ten minutes.

Know a 3D modelling friend, working on software like lightwave or 3Dmax for a long time. Tell him that you can get him an Intense 3DLabs Wildcat 4000 for £19.99 on ebay and watch his reaction. At the time of its release, the Wildcat was with the 4110 the killer graphic card in Digital Computer Creation. The Intense3D Wildcat 4000 is meant for advanced 3D performance in animation, MCAD and MCAE applications. It is based on a RenderGL 2D GDI and a 3D graphics subsystem with DirectBurst technology optimized for the 3D graphics pipeline and thus boosting advanced 2D and 3D rendering performance. The card would be a nice gift for a budding student willing to go into 3D modelling but without the cost.

This is the kind of stuff that get people from mediaworkstation.com to say "I can't for the life of me remember what was inside the box itself aside from its much-coveted Wildcat 4000 graphics card. Yeah, you heard me. That was at the time THE board to get. And when I finally got the system hooked in and booted to Maya and started putting scenes together, that card flew like nothing else. I was stunned, and I fell in love. An unnatural kind of love, but that's mostly me." dixit Dariush Derakhshani. Still it would be an interesting thing to compare how this monster of a card (nearly one foot long would compare with entry level cards like the G4MX 400 or the Radeon 9200. Any guesses?

Last but not least, also on ebay, we found loads of ATI Radeon All in Wonder 8500 for £29.99. Those were the cards to die for two years ago and have since been superseeded by the AIW 9600, 9700 and 9800. This particular Radeon 8500 (R200) AIW has a Pal TV tuner and a set of connectors (Stereo audio, S-video, and composite video inputs and outputs, External stereo connection to sound card's line input and output, firewire and Dolby® digital stereo audio output (S/PDIF)).

Performance wise, it should kick the donkey ass of entry level cards like the G4MX400 or the Radeon 9200 while offering top notch quality, a silicon tuner and MPEG2 capture. It is also natively compatible with LCD screen as it has a DVI port - a 15 pin adaptor is included. This card will be perfect in an entry level gig. The GPU speed is 230Mhz while the memory speed is 190Mhz. Overclocking though is possible and with the inclusion of pixel shader, vertex shder and true form and the availability of 4 render pipelines, it is your best bet in the graphic world yet. No wonder, I bought one. BTW, its launch price two years ago was £299.99. µ