Today's hardware buys

USA
There's a hot deal floating around the web, on a number of websites. PCsurplusonline, a regular seller featuring on our dailybuys, is selling a pair (two) of matched Intel Pentium 4 Xeon 1.6GHz processors - step code SL6GV - for only $119.99. The processors have a 400MHz FSB, 512KB L2 cache - not the smaller 256KB cache - and use 1.3v each. They don't come with any HSF but you should be able to find a couple of these for cheap.

Plus, they are new processors and do have Hyper-Threading which might help. A couple of lads over at the forums have been able to overclock the CPU's stably to over 2.6GHz. The preferred motherboard is the vCore U-Wire Mod. GamePC says of the PC-DL that it is "a superb mid-range dual Xeon platform with tons of onboard goodies and the stability and performance one would expect from a Xeon motherboard. We have a feeling this is going to be a very popular platform". After the overclocking, the combo should be able to encode a 200MB MPEG file to WMV format at maximym details in less than three minutes. µ

UK
I knew that that colour laser printers were going to become cheap but not that cheap. Until the end of this month, Ebuyer is selling the Samsung CLP-500 which we have already covered here, for £199.14+VAT, making it by far the cheapest colour laser printer. All people which did buy it loved it to death thanks to its standard duplexing, 1200 dpi printing, 20ppm mono printing and 5ppm colour printing.

On the downside though, it is very heavy, has no networking facilities, doesn't come with a USB or a parallel cable and consummables may cost you more than the printer itself. The 64MB onboard memory really helps as is the fact that the first print comes out really quick. The model is also available from Xeros as the Phaser 6400BD but costs substantially more.

France
Though that LGA775 motherboards were expensive in France? Think again, AGEM informatique has an Asrock 775I65GV motherboard,obviously not the worst model available for €75.90, roughly £43+VAT. The card is made up of a ICH5 southbridge and surprise, surprise an Intel 865GV northbridge.

A socket 775 is present together with two DIMM slots of a total capacity of 2GB. If you do not want to use the integrated Intel Extreme Graphics 2 graphic module, then put in your own card via Asrock patented A.G.I 8x graphic slot - this unique feature allows chipsets which were not supposed to support external AGP cards, well, to support them. Apart from these, one AMR and three PCI slots are provided. Other notable features include a CMedia 6-channel AC97 audio, 10/100 LAN ethernet courtesy of Realtek, two Serial ATA connectors and two ATA100/66 connectors, eight USB 2.0 ports and most importantly, Asrock Hybrid Booster can be considered as an overclocker's best friend with CPU frequency stepless control, AGP/PCI control, Asrock U-COP which guards against overheating and Boot Failure Guard. In comparison, the cheapest LGA775 motherboard in UK costs more than £57+VAT. µ

Singapore
This has to be the cheapest DVD Writer in the world. What about one for £27+VAT? Storagestudio from Singapore is selling the GSA-4081B at S$99 for a limited period. The drive supports DVD+R/W, DVD-R/W and DVD-RAM. It writes to DVD+R at 8X, DVD-RAM at 3X and DVD-R at 4x. While its CDR and CDRW writing speeds are low by today's standard, it is quite good for the occasional CD burner and as an added bonus, it has good erading speeds.

NeoDV, Recorder Gold and Clip are the software included. The drive also has a two MB buffer and an access time of 155ms and 135ms respectively. Reviews found that it has good CD writing quality and while featuring the Super Link buffer underrun protection, it allows up to 94 minutes of overburning. All its qualities earnt it the PC Plus editors choice last May. Buy it while stocks last. µ