Reg Kit Watch

Desktop PC

The Leviathan III family is equipped with single Opteron 240, 242 or 244 CPUs and built around Nvidia's nForce 3 Pro 150 chipset, which offers AGP 8x, Serial ATA and a dual-channel DDR SDRAM bus. The PC ships with 333MHz DDR, USB 2.0 and 1394 ports, 160-240GB of hard drive storage (using two 80-120GB drives) with RAID 0, 1 or 0+1 if you want it, S/PDIF digital audio I/O, six-channel sound and 10/100Mbps Ethernet.

A basic system with 1.4GHz Opteron 240, 512MB of registered ECC SDRAM, 80GB hard drive, 16x DVD optical drive,a 256MB GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and Windows XP Home Edition costs $1947.50.

Flash Drive

Verbatim has begun shipping USB 2.0-compatible Flash drives in its Store'n'Go range.

The drives are essentially standard Flash drives, but by providing Hi-Speed USB 2.0 support, they can deliver up to 8MBps read and 5MBps write performance on systems equipped with suitable ports and USB 2.0 drivers - roughly eight times faster than USB 1.1 devices. However, the drives are compatible with USB 1.1, so they will work on other systems.

The drives also offer password protection, and can be partitioned using bundled software into public and private storage volumes.

About the size of a AA battery, the Store'n'Go drives are offered with 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB and 1GB capacities. Prices range from $29 (32MB) to $349 (1GB).

Curiously, despite being back by a lifetime warranty, the drives are only certified to hold data for "ten years or more", Verbatim said. ®