A dual Xeon for next to almost nothing

UK
Still another Gem on Ebay. A Dell Precision 620 which houses a Dual Pentium Xeon 1GHz - yep, two of them - 512MB PC800 RIMM Rambus and a 18GB SCSI drive in a Chassis. The price on Buy it now was only £225. That alone would justify its price. But wait. There's something else under its hood. The Dell Precision 620 workstation also comes with a 3D Labs Wildcat 5110 sporting 128MB SDRAM - Dedicated 64 MB texture memory and 64 MB frame buffer. This dedicated 3D graphic card alone cost £1878 in UK at Microwarehouse. Although not as fast as the current generation of 3D cards like the Quadro FX or the ATI FireGL 9900. There is OS provided with it but you will still get a DVDROM drive, USB ports, a 410W PSU and a SBLive CT4780 sound card. Other technical data include - integrated Adaptec 7899 Ultra 160/M LVD SCSI card, a netword card, intel i840 chipset, four PCI 32bit slot and two 64-bit PCI Slot. You can bet that this machine will be a decent web server or find its place in the room of a 3D modelling student. µ

USA
The Netgear RP614 router is a fairly basic one but at this price, it is unbeatable - $0 after rebate. The router integrates a 4-port 10/100Mbps switch. Also in the spec list comes with a NAT firewall with VPN pass-through which protects against hackers. As a router, it allows sharing of your broadband internet connection, letting you sharing information between PCs and laptops and sharing your printers and other peripherals. The RP614 is fairly easy to configure and get to work. However, reviews over the web point to its unstability as well as some incompatibilities.

Some mouse clicks away and outpost provides you with the unique opportunity of acquiring two 120GB hard disks for S$99.98, that's less than $0.90 per gigabyte. The offer comes after a $30 rebate and is limited to two per household. The hard disk drive on sale is a Western Digital 120GB WD120JBRTL retail kit which features a seek time of 8.9ms, a rotational speed of 7200rpm and most importantly a 8MB buffer. Two hard disks will be essential if you want to have RAID-1 for example - the absolute online backup - well almost.

On top of that, you'll be provided with WD's exclusive hardware and software protection - the Data Lifeguard. This feature allows the hard disk to self detect and correct any potential problem. It is available as a software directly downloadable form WD's website. No mention however if it is compatible with other brands.

Want something different? Then why not buy this 200GB hard disk drive from Seagate, the ST320022, which comes with average specs but a fantastic five year limited warranty as compared to WD's one year. µ

Singapore
Laser has a special nForce 2 motherboard on sale for a mere S$114 - slightly more than the £30.63+VAT asked by Dabs. The Gigabyte 7NF-RZ is one of the new products to be included in the Gigabyte RZ value series, not unlike Asus and Asrock. The 7NF-RZ is a no-frill performance and value motherboard. It performs on par with more expensive nForce2 ultra 400 motherboard and if you do not need SATA or raid or other gizmos that have made Gigabyte so popular recently, then this board is for you. This is NOT to say that the board is nude or bare though. It is 400MHz FSB compatible, comes with three DIMM slots, has one AGP and Five PCI slots and five USB 2.0 ports. On top of that you get integrated peripherals from Realtek - the usual 5.1 channel support and the ubiquitous 10/100 Ethernet LAN. You can connect up to four ATA devices and a SPDIF I/O pin is also present.

Interestngly, you can adjust CPU FSB, AGP clock and DIMM clock which maens that the board is slightly overclockable after all. Other notable stuff includes the Norton Antivirus Security platform - yawn - as well as other Gigabyte properietary features. Note that the board support DDR Dual channel configuration. Overall probably the best value socket A board around in terms of performance and reliability. µ