Last week, we took a look at the ASUS Striker II Extreme. This week, we shall take a look at XFX's nForce 790i Ultra board, which comes packaged in an attractive box.

The ASUS board looks very fanciful, whereas XFX has decided to go with the industrial look. The layout is decent and we shouldn't experience any problems when it comes to installing/removing cards/memories/cables.

The cooling around the CPU socket looks adequate and should be able to withstand some pretty heavy overclocking.

The thing that would catch one's eye would be the tower-styled northbridge heatsink to ensure better heat dissipation for lower operating temperatures.

Green color-coded PCI Express slots for Tri-SLI!

This board is comparatively much cheaper than the ASUS Striker II Extreme at only $619, and you could grab it at Cybermind Computer House.

If you do not need the features offered by the ASUS board, you could probably take some time to consider this product.

Yet another Intel X48-based board? How about yes, and no? You would probably overlook it as the MSI X48 Platinum, but this is actually the X48C Platinum which could handle both DDR2 and DDR3 memories on the same board. Talk about future upgradability!

The board looks rather similar to the X48 Platinum, but we only have 4 internal SATA ports only on this board! The same Circu-Pipe heatpipe/heatsink concept cools the essential components on this motherboard.

Six DIMM slots! It's been a while since we all have seen six slots on a desktop board! The green/orange slots are for DDR2 memories, while the blue/pink slots are for DDR3 memories.

A switch card is provided and this must be used to tell the motherboard what memories are onboard. Slot the switch card into the DDR3 slot if you are using DDR2, and vice-versa.

8-phase PWM finally?

With a price tag of only $419 at Fuwell Technologies (5th floor), this board should be moving some sales.

This is MSI's rendition of the 9800GX2 1GB. As mentioned before, there are no differences between all the 9800GX2 cards out in the market except the stickers pasted on the cards by the different manufacturers.

The MSI 9800GX2 1GB goes for $899.

In the world of PCI Express graphics cards and more PCI Express graphics card, Biostar has not forgotten a small group of users who are still running on older systems with AGP graphics slots.

We have here the Biostar GeForce 6800XT 256MB AGP card. It is fairly simple with a small fan and no 4-pin molex connector. Display options are one VGA port, one DVI port and one TV-out port.

This card can be gotten for a reasonable price of $99 only.

Freshly out of the shipping boxes is the Leadtek Quadro FX 1700 512MB card. The nVidia Quadro series is design for professionals who are into designing such as CAD/CAM.

Warning: Purchasing this card would set you back close to a nice one and three-quarter grand.

The above three products could be found at Cybermind Computer House.

Powercolor offers their HD3650 mid-range graphics with 1GB of 128-bit DDR3 memory, while their Xtreme version of the HD3850 comes with a non-standard cooler by ZEROtherm. The third-party cooling solution would definitely help to achieve lower temperatures when compared to the factory ATI cooler.

Prices for the HD3650 1GB version and HD3850 Xtreme are $179 and $249 respectively at Fuwell Technologies.

Even though ASUS is a relatively new sound card player in the market, their products have received favourable reviews. We have here today the ASUS Xonar DX, which is the younger sibling of the D2X.

These are some of the features onboard the ASUS Xonar DX.

It is a half-height card, but uses a full height PCI bracket meant for your common PC. However, included in the box is also another PCI bracket, that is about the same height as the card itself only should you need it.

Full solid capacitors!

And if you realised by now, you won't be popping this card into a PCI slot, but a PCI Express x1 slot.

On the back of the card, we find a Cirrus Logic CS4362 24-bit digital-to-analog (D/A) convertor, along with JRC 5532 op-amps.

This card could be said as a rival to long-time soundcard maker Creative. The ASUS Xonar DX is retailing at $145 at Cybermind Computer House.

Microsoft's latest wireless laser mice on sale at Fuwell Technologies. The Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 is retailing for $109, while the Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 is going for $95. The 7000 model offers easy-charging; you simply put the mouse on the supplied cradle after use and it will charge its battery automatically.

Over at Chamoxa, we spotted the 3Com OfficeConnect ADSL wireless router as well as 3Com Gigabyte Switch on sale. 3Com produces some pretty great products, and it is a pity that not many shops stock 3Com products.

The 3Com router (model 3CRWDR101A-75) has an integrated modem that supports ADSL2 and ADSL2+. The wireless runs on 802.11g standard, and supports WPA2 and AES. Also, it has a stateful packet inspection (SPI) firewall in-built too (it's the norm nowadays). The Gigabit switch has five 10/100/1000 ports that are auto-sensing and auto MDI/MDIX. There is also QoS and Jumbo Frame support.

The wireless modem-cum-router goes for only $84 (our chief editor bought one on the spot), and the switch goes for $75.

Over at Fuwell Technologies (5th floor outlet), we spotted a new revision of the Western Digital 250GB SATA hard disk. The deep underside of the 250GB drive, as well as its weight being just about the same as its 320GB -00B3A0 brother do make us suspect that this new revision is actually running on single platter (new 320GB/platter design) and not the older 166GB/platter design.

But please do not take our word for it, anyone wishes to give it a go?

If one remembers (I think all would), external hard disk pricings were insanely low, especially for the 1TB versions during the IT Show 2008. Western Digital was the first to slash prices to $299 during the fair (or may I call it pasar malam...?)

If you do need a hard drive now, we managed to find the larger capacity Western Digital MyBook 1TB external 3.5-inch drives going for $359 (for the Essential Edition) and $399 (for the Home Edition) at Media Mart.

The difference between the Essential Edition and Home Edition is that the former only offers USB 2.0 connectivity, whereas the latter not only provides USB 2.0, but also Firewire 400 and eSATA ports.

Various Samsung LCD panels of different sizes are also available at Media Mart.

Or may I tempt you to get an Asus Nova M20 mini PC for only $699?

Moving over to Lawgic, we take a look at some of their DIY systems available and watercooling products for the enthusiast.

Lawgic is located at #03-02, which happens to be the 3rd floor backlane.

This system shown in the above two images was fully built by Lawgic, and uses mostly Gigabyte peripherals where they are available. The motherboard, the 9800GX2 and even down to the casing (Gigabyte Mercury), are all by Gigabyte.

(Just for some side information, this system looks like its meant for some serious gaming. But guess what? This gaming rig is actually meant for the buyer's son... I mean, you have some serious processing power there, coupled with a Samsung 32-inch full HD, yes, full HD LCD screen...)

Okay, lets move back into something more... affordable? Here are two Gigabyte cooling products; the Volar for your desktop processor, while the G-Pad Pro is for your laptop. The Volar CPU cooler is somewhat unique with its tilted heatsink design, but one of the other more important points is its silent cooling, which is rated at 18dB(A) only.

Or perhaps you got some inspiration from that kick-ass gaming rig? Well, here's something simple that can get you started.

More cooling products are available on Lawgic's shelves. Just pop over to take a look!