Reg Kit Watch

Hard Drive

Hitachi Global Storage will ship its Deskstar7K250 250GB Serial ATA drive at the end of the month, the manufacturer said today.

The 3.5in unit will be offered at capacities of 40, 80, 120, 160 and 250GB. Depending on capacity each drive has between one and three platters, and up to six GMR recording heads. The drive spins at 7200rpm for a 8.5ms average seek time and an average latency of 4.17ms.

The one- and two-platter units can stand up to 350G non-operating shock, while the three-platter version can cope with 300G worth of shock.

Graphics Cards

Creative has said its latest Nvidia-based DirectX 9 graphics cards, the 3D Blaster 5 FX 5900 Ultra and the 3D Blaster 5 FX 5600 Ultra, will ship in the UK next month.

The 5900 will retail for a penny short of £500 including VAT, but delivers 338 million vertices per second and a fill rate of 3.6 billion texels per second. The AGP 8x board is loaded with 256MB of DDR SDRAM clocked to 850MHz. The graphics chip's 256-bit core is clocked to 450MHz.

The 5600 features a 400MHz core and 128MB of 800MHz memory. It's stats show it can process 100 million vertices per second and achieve a fill rate of 1.6 billion texels per second. It too requires and AGP 8x connector. It will retail for around £219.99 including VAT. ®