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Jack Says:
Trends & Prices in Phuket's Computer Market
Seldom seen but often heard Club member Jack gives us his two cents' worth for March 15th, 2011
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Not a whole lot going on this week. RAM prices have dropped again a little bit: HardwareHouse has a shop inside BigC (actual BigC dept store) just before the electronics dept. right after the toys. It's the counter in the middle. They sell everything that HWH sells but add about 10% to the price (I suspect that is the commission paid to BigC). They don't have much in stock but claim they can order anything HWH sells within 3 days assuming it's in stock in BKK. Their prices can be found at www.hwhinter.com The girls at the shop have no clue about what they are selling so don't bother asking them any technical questions. Some items are cheaper than JIB and they list the 4 GB Notebook SO-DIMMs at Bt 1350. Sells for Bt 1495 here on Phuket. I bought 2. HWH has 3 shops inside Pantip Plaza alone and around 100 in Thailand. Big international company. |
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Asus has finally shipped the new B3 stepping SandyBridge MoBos for sale in Thailand. The boxes have clear labels stating the B3 stepping. Some vendors still sell the old models. If buying a H67/P67 Mobo, pay attention that you get the B3 version. Gigabyte has added the B3 code to every model number to avoid confusion. New Z68 chipset due out in May. SandyBridge has a catch. The H67 supports IGP but not overclocking. The P67 supports overclocking but not IGP. Z68 does both. It's going to be their "enthusiast" chipset and presumably carries a premium price too. The Intel HD 2000 is very good and the HD 3000 IGP is excellent. About 2x faster than AMDs Radeon 4290 IGP in their 890GX chipset (Leons will not like to hear this :o) It will also introduce SSD caching with the 10.5 version of Intel RST. Intel claims the drive will combine a SSD and a HDD to a hybrid and show them as a single drive. The driver will automatically choose which files better go on the SSD for speed. No tests available yet but sounds interesting. No info on if it will work on H67 / P67 chipsets but Z68 is confirmed. Core i3-2100 is the cheapest SandyBridge CPU @ Bt 3990. Cheapest Mobo is Bt 2990. That makes for a roughly Bt 11.000 rock bottom price PC based on SandyBridge (parts only). AMD has their E350 Fusion APU based MoBos out. Most are in mini-ITX format intended for HTPC use. Prices around Bt 4000. Superior performance compared to Intel Atom but a Socket 775 system with dedicated VGA card costs the same and is significantly faster. I'd opt for it only if size or/and power consumption was a factor. The C-50 APU is brilliant in a netbook though but so far only ACER uses a full 720p screen. SSD (Solid State Hard Disks-- chips where a disk usually sits)When using a SSD some of the Windows features can and even should be turned off. SuperFetch, automatic Defrag and Indexing service in the forefront. Since the seek time on a SSD is virtually zero, there's no need to "predict" the data needed next. Defrag causes unnecessary wear to the MLC memory modules. SSDs own garbage collection and TRIM in Win7 take care of this. New SandForce Gen 3 based SSDs have read and write speeds exceeding 500 MB/sec. Should be available about now. Prices slightly higher than SandForce2 based units. They all come with SATA3 because their speed exceeds the SATA2 limits. It will not be long though for SSDs to reach the limit of SATA3 too, then what ? Perhaps PCI-E based drives like the OCZ Revo drives. CORE i7 Desktop replacementThe next gen CPUs based on the Socket 2011 instead of the 1366 are due Q4 2011. Not much other details yet. Currently the 1366 CPUs don't make much sense anymore when compared to 1155 CPUs. That's a pretty long wait to keep uncompetitive products on the market. I guess many MoBo manufacturers have a lot of X58 based stock they need to sell off. A couple of tips for laptop users for maintenance and upgrades.
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