Gigabyte's X700 is a groovy flame cut number

MORE NIFTY RELEASES from last week, in no particular order other than when they hit my inbox. The first of these is Gigabyte with their ATI X700Pro based card, the GV-RX70P256V. This one is a PCIe card with the high end X700 bells and whistles, 256MB GDDR3, VIVO, and a red flame cutout on top of the heatsink. The nice part about this board is that there is a heatpipe under that cutout, but no fan. Yes, you heard me, no fan. You want a silent high end card, call Gigabyte and order one.

The very next day, BenQueue came out with a neat little MP3 player cum memory stick cum radio called the Joybee 125. In addition to all of this, it has a feature called segment repeat, which seems like a little bit of fixed length rewind/previous track function. The part that I don't get is the explanation of what this feature does, coupled with the FM radio and recording features. It "lets you listen and record FM broadcasts, expanding your sources of information and entertainment". Woe betide those who need AM sources of information and entertainment. For the woe-less, it comes in orange, silver and black.

Next up is Kingmax with the Mars series of DDR2. Two things caught my eye here, first is the bright red anti-counterfeit red ASIC decoder chip, it is a really red dot in the middle of the DIMM. The other thing that stood out is a little more subtle, the speeds. No, not latency or OC potential, but the stock speeds. The Mars DDR2 comes in 533 and 667 speeds, but not in 400. DDR2 has been on the market for about 6 months and already the lowest end speed is dead, and the unreleased 667 is common as dirt. How tech marches on.

Next up is a book you might be interested in called Building the Perfect PC. This book by Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson, with a forward by Jerry Pournelle, is basically about how to pick out parts and put them together so they not only work, but make sense. That part is where most people fall down, big GPU and little CPU, or way to much HD and not enough RAM. It also gets into where you can skimp and where you shouldn't. Overall, if you want to build a PC and don't have much of a clue, or worse yet, think you have a clue, this might be the book for you. Wow, that rhymed. While it may be a little behind the cutting edge, the authors are probably a lot saner than most forum posters.

Last up is Fogware and their Internet Radio Recorder software. It lets you basically do a TIVO on your internet radio streams, play, pause and record, singly or in parallel. You can look up stations with their online station list update, and then go to town. It will convert between formats, and even supports OGG along with the proprietary formats. There should be enough tweaks here to satisfy the most jaded of internet radio aficionados. µ