- First nForce3-250 Barebones System Released

Soltek handed out a press release today announcing their EQ3801 series barebones PC. Based on nVidia's nForce3 250 chipset, i've attached a doc containing the specs here. This is the first SFF entry into the market to use the new chipset from nVidia. Undoubtedly there will be more from other vendors to follow.

Based on the powerful NVIDIA nForce3-250Gb chipset, QBIC EQ3801 Series offers the support for AMD Socket-754 64-bit CPUs, and is optimized for the emerging 64-bit operating systems and applications. Combined with the cutting edge I/O and multimedia features such as Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE1394, SATA RAID, USB2.0 and 8-channel audio, the QBIC EQ3801 series is the ultimate barebone solution for power users to experience high-speed connectivity for today's network and to get more work done by delivering the best system performance.

- 20 Hard Disk Drives Mega Roundup

Looking to purchase a bit more storage space? The folks over at XBit have been busy testing a whole stack of 80GB hard drives from Hitachi, WD, Seagate, Samsung, and Maxtor. They use a bunch of various testing methods to produce what proves to be some very interesting results. These new Sammy drives look to be all the jazz in particular.

It was easy to choose the subject of the today's roundup: every hardware forum has topics like "Which drive of xxx capacity is better?" That's quite natural for users to ask for advice from more informed community members. On the other hand, few users have the opportunity of forming a personal opinion about all hard disk drives available in the market, so such topics usually degenerate into an argument of several people who are all claiming that their personal experience is the only "truth".