This Week's Hot Purchases

[svartalf]

Inside Intel's SSD | Features | Custom PC

Gief!

 

[Mazling]

There is one thing fundementally wrong with dabs... They are owned by BT, but you can't pick up a phone and talk to a human being there.

They used to be a good company, but now their customer service is appalling and completely web based.

I've always got through to them just fine via the web. Nice helpful chap at their end too. *shrug*

 

[Dark Orb Choir]

Videocardshop.co.uk Product Information


XFX 9800 GTX £129.99 inc VAT

 

[inactionman]

Not worth it with the 4850 being cheaper, and faster.

 

[Kryten]

Just a quicky:

1gb of ram for a tenner : or more to the point 4 of them for 40 quid

Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL5 Lifetime Warranty - Ebuyer

 

[Fast]

22" Monitor with DVI

22" Arianet Widescreen LCD Monitor With DVI - Black - Aria Technology

Cheap as imo

 

[dysfunction]

22" Arianet Widescreen LCD Monitor With DVI - Black - Aria Technology

Cheap as imo

Being that cheap....whats wrong with it?

 

[Fast]

Being that cheap....whats wrong with it?

Mates got delivered today. He's happy so far, no dead pixels, colours are good. That's all i can tell you really

Edit: 3yr warranty

 

[Kryten]

Been a bit quiet on this thread lately. Not because I'm being lazy, but more to the point there's very little good going on in the way of tech that's either worthwhile or financially viable/good value. Plus with the dollar/pound ratio getting worse, the prices are reflecting that rather seriously.

Until the i7 series of processors really make a big impact (less so on the wallet!) then : Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Socket 775 (3.0GHz) 1333FSB 6MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor - Ebuyer isn't a half bad price/buy currently. If that goes up, they're only 3 quid more at Aria.

Cheap and cheerful screen?
Cibox C1907 19" TFT Monitor Widescreen 1440x900 300cd/m2 800:1 5ms Multimedia VGA Black Speakers - Ebuyer
There's a Hanns-G one fora couple of quid less but currently out of stock.

The only prices that are really staying low/coming down are memory and memory sticks, other than that everything has been stagnant for the last few weeks. I will continue trawling the popular sites once a week and report back anything I find that'll be worthwhile posting.
If there's anything anyone's shopping for currently, or on a wishlist and you'd like me to keep a watchful eye on prices, drop me a message on this thread and I'll take a look

 

[Kryten]

Speakers

Been a large number of people on other sites and IRC looking for speakers recently, and came across this today in my inbox:

Logitech G51 5.1 Surround Sound Speaker System - 155W RMS - Ebuyer

70 quid for a fairly decent set of 5.1's from Logitech is a good price, may well be worth a look.

 

[soze]

Whats the cheapest you can find a IB-NAS4220-B and 2 1tb F1 drives for? £240 cheapest i have found so far.

 

[Kryten]

£95 for the NAS box and a pair of Samsung Spinpoints for £72.40 each - £239.80!
Both from Aria and can shave off another fiver with their "Very Limited Super Specials" offer on the drives. Prices for the drives are a fair bit higher everywhere else, the NAS is pretty identical give or take a fiver everywhere.

 

[Bahumat]

22" Arianet Widescreen LCD Monitor With DVI - Black - Aria Technology

Cheap as imo

Just ordered this for myself Also got next day delivery before 10:30 am

 

[Kryten]

Let me know what it's like - nearly bought one myself but opted for a Samsung instead purely on the brightness/contrast ratios and name for 50 quid more.

 

[Bahumat]

will do

 

[Bahumat]

The VGA cable they send you is very short Gonna drill a small hole in my desk lol

 

[Kryten]

Heh, same problem with my Samsung No means to drill holes - just had to move my box closer


Anyway, some Christmas deals:

Geforce 9800GT OC (BFG) £113 : BFG 9800GT OC Edition 512MB Dual DVI HDTV Out Cuda and PhysX ready PCI-E Graphics Card - Ebuyer

LiteON Lightscribe DVDRW Multi drive £13 : LiteOn 16x16 DVDRW/RAM DL Lightscribe Black - Bare OEM - Ebuyer

Kingston HyperX 4gb kit 800mhz £34 : Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 HyperX Memory Non-ECC CL5 - Ebuyer

 

[Fast]

Cheap Space
newsletter - Aria Technology

 

[dysfunction]

Do Hitachi make good drives then? I've never bought one so have no idea about how good they are...

I would rather spend say another £10 on a different make if I knew it would be faster and more reliable...

Like this one: http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials...+F1+SATA2+7200RPM+32MB+cache+?productId=30998

 

[Bahumat]

Yeah i could not move my pc so had to drill a hole in the desk, but its behind where the monitor sits so you cant see it

Monitor is very good

 

[inactionman]

Do Hitachi make good drives then? I've never bought one so have no idea about how good they are...

I would rather spend say another £10 on a different make if I knew it would be faster and more reliable...

Like this one: 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA2 7200RPM 32MB cache - Aria Technology

Storage Review do tend to rate Hitachi drives higher than other manufacturers, I'd see what they suggest, however the F1's are very good drives.

 

[Kryten]

Ive just gone from 3 x Hitachi 400gb units to 3 x Samsung 1tb F1 units, both are very good. The hitachis still run as backup drives, and before I got my hands on them were used in a 24/7 storage array for around 3 years. Still solid.

 

[Kryten]

Very cheap, high spec laptop if anyone's in the market:

HP 6735s Laptop, AMD Turion X2 Dual Core RM-72 2.1Ghz, 4GB 800DDR2, 250GB 15.4" DVD RW LightScribe Writer, WLAN, Webcam, Bluetooth 2.0+, Onboard ATI Radeon HD3200 Windows Vista Home Premium, MSO rdy (60 day trial or 25 uses) - Ebuyer

 

[nath]

AMD though. Are they decent now?

 

[Kryten]

They've never been entirely appalling (well, not for a while) - in my opinion it's just that Intel have had the upper hand, both desktop and portable, with the Core hardware. Still, for that price it's a fair monster of a laptop for very little cash - the same money barely gets you a half-spec Atom.

 

[Morphius]

I've been looking for a Netbook for my travels, but i'm quite tempted to get this instead and get a Netbook nearer to when I go travelling, do you reckon this bitch could handle many games at a playable level?

 

[Earl]

Very cheap, high spec laptop if anyone's in the market:

HP 6735s Laptop, AMD Turion X2 Dual Core RM-72 2.1Ghz, 4GB 800DDR2, 250GB 15.4" DVD RW LightScribe Writer, WLAN, Webcam, Bluetooth 2.0+, Onboard ATI Radeon HD3200 Windows Vista Home Premium, MSO rdy (60 day trial or 25 uses) - Ebuyer

I do sometimes slightly wonder why I'm paying a £700 premium for less specs but OSX. I can never find it in me to switch back though.

Wish they'd just make OSX for other hardware, so it had full support, unlike the hackint0sh versions.

 

[Kryten]

Earl : My sentiments entirely, even as an entire "Apple are Fuckwits" person OSX is a decent OS and could make them a fortune if they opened it up to other systems. If they're worried about supporting it themselves, make it open source and let the community do it, it's worked wonders for other open source systems



Now, will it run games? You won't be Crysising on it (!?, mouthful!) but the GPU is certainly a step up from the Intel GMA hardware you'll otherwise get for this money, and I can see it running Quake 4 and similar.

 

[nath]

Damn you Kryt! I've decided to ditch the idea of finding my mum a laptop and give her my still fairly fresh Lenovo and get that HP bad boy. I soooo do not need a new laptop but it's so purrrdy .

 

[Kryten]

lol, now I just hope it ain't actually quite shit

Should be fine mate, but that's an impulse buy if ever I saw one! - spending your christmas bonus?