This Week's Hot Purchases

[soze]

Originally Posted by inactionman

Must have been mis-priced, now £222 inc Vat.

Thats a shame i should have ordered one to see if they shipped it or binned the order.

[Jonty]

Originally Posted by Kryten

Looking to step up to BluRay?
BDRom Reader with DVDRW/CDRW combi, £125:
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

This has dropped to £86 on Scan now. It seems a good deal considering it reads Blu-ray discs and HD-DVD discs, as well as being a lightscribe DVD burner. It's good to see prices dropping.

Kind regards

[Yaka]

i wouldnt recomend buying from scam no matter how good thier prices.

if something was not delivered and you complain you are treated to a whole new level of shit customr services

[Kryten]

End of the day we've all got consumer rights and if something doesn't go well, regardless of who the company is, there's lots of protection and help available. I've never had trouble with Scan - in fact the only company I've had serious issue with is eBuyer, and look who's links I post the most

[kirennia]

OcUK GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail

down to under £100, that's a silly price!. Taken from krytens link so just an update really. Gonna have to start visiting techie forums a bit more often I think Could get two of them for under £200. That's seriously, ridiculous!

edit:£94 to be pricise

[Kryten]

Fucking stonking

SLI 8800GT's for 184 quid.
I paid that for my single one not too long ago

That's a HELL of a lot of bang for the buck for nVidia board users.

[Reza]

That's a great spot Kirennia.

Another decent find, that a friend pointed out to me:

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII

1TB HD with 334GB per plater tech, for £99.99 with free delivery.

[Kryten]

Indeed, the prices are looking very good still, we're being spoiled.

Sorry I haven't been keeping you folks updated recently on some of the best deals but you lot are doing a fine job without me

Still no internet at home and as a result don't have the ability to hunt around for the best deals to advise upon.

[inactionman]

That's a great price for that samsung drive!

I prefer the hitachi drives myself, but for a ~£40 price difference (or about 1/3 the price) I'd probably pick up the samsungs (if I didn't already have 2x terabyte hitachis).

[Nate]

It's already sold out

[Reza]

Something else that should sell out fast, E8500 @ £182.13 inc. vat and free shipping option:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz) Socket 775 Wolfdale

Has been a pain trying to find these in UK stock, and for one of the few places that has a some that's a good price (although on the whole the chip itself doesnt offer best bang for buck at the moment, as E8400 can be had at around £40-50 cheaper).

But if like me you were waiting for this and building now, then this is a good offer.

Edit:

Btw if anyone spots or knows how I could go about getting the Socket 775 Xeon equivalent to Wolfdales and Yorkfields please let me know. The 45nm socket 775 are E3110, X3320, X3350, X3360 I think. They should basically be identical chips to the Wolfdale and Yorkfield equivalent but they probably are binned for better thermal performance.

[Jonty]

Hi Reza

I think you hit the nail on the head; the E8400 is a much better buy. The only difference between the two chips is a 0.16Ghz higher clock speed, which doesn't seem worth the price difference given how well these chips overclock. Still, the E8500 is very good value, but just not the best.

As for the Xeon processors, I guess it just depends where you shop. Some enthusiast stores could probably source one for you if you asked nicely (or if you're really desperate, I can post you one from Taiwan, but it'll be more expensive than buying in the UK). I heard the X3320 can be overclocked to 3.2Ghz with decent air cooling, so it's pretty good, although the normal Core CPUs are no slouch either.

Kind regards

[Reza]

Yeah 0.5 extra on the multiplier for £45 or so, is not great value. Effectively I paid a big premium just to see if I could get a stable system running at 4GHz on air. It's just a meaningless arbitrary target, but a goal I wanted to try and aim for nonetheless.

Around half my components are made by Taiwanese based companies, and some were quite a pain to source actually . If I was there like you I would have probably chosen a couple of others also, but the idea of having to ship to Taiwan for RMA was enough to put me off a few.

Ive heard good things about the Xeon 45nms too. Especially the E3110 which is basically a E8400, but runs cooler and needs less Vcore it seems.

[Cadelin]

Originally Posted by kirennia

OcUK GeForce 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail

down to under £100, that's a silly price!. Taken from krytens link so just an update really. Gonna have to start visiting techie forums a bit more often I think Could get two of them for under £200. That's seriously, ridiculous!

edit:£94 to be pricise

I have been thinking of getting a new graphics card soon. I was planning on spending around £100. Is a better offer likely to come around in the next month or two? Is there anything specific to my computer that I need to look for? My computer is nearly 2 years old running XP.

[Jonty]

Hi Cadelin

There are rumours of a 9800 GT coming out in the summer, which will replace the 8800 GT. However, don't expect them to be at or below £100 when they launch.

Given that your computer is two years old, either an 8800 GT or 9600 GT should offer a nice performance boost (the latter is not quite as powerful as an 8800 GT, but it has better HD video decoding, better DirectX 10 performance, and a fairly small price tag). Always check out some reviews on the internet before you buy

Kind regards