Weekly Hardware Price Guide - Motherboards & Memory: May 2002 2nd Edition

Introduction
The second installment of AnandTech's hardware priceguides of May focuses on motherboards with VIA and Intel chipsets and memory including DDR and RDRAM. For those of you not familiar with the guides here is a brief overview on how we construct them:

We select vendors to appear in our Price Guides based on two requirements: solid consumer feedback and having the lowest possible pricing. You'll notice that these vendors aren't paying us to be listed here; we do not accept requests to be listed here. We have tried to eliminate vendors with low feedback rating, but we do encourage you to do your own research before purchasing from any of these vendors.

With the new and improved Price Guides we have not only increased our standards when evaluating online vendors, but we have also partnered up with our friends at CNet to offer yet another service to you all. Using CNet's Shopper.com search engine we can provide you with an additional pool of vendors to search from that are checked up on by CNet. You can wade through those results by clicking on the CNet Pricing link in the second to last column on the right.

If there are any problems with the guide or a vendor's pricing changes dramatically then be sure to email the author listed at the top of the page and we'll take appropriate action. Remember that although some vendors may be cheaper, we only list those with generally positive feedback from a decent number of consumers. As usual, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to email us or post in the AnandTech Forums.

Also be sure to check out AnandTech's Hot Deals Forum for even more great Motherboards, Memory and other technology buys.

Disclaimer
AnandTech does not endorse any vendor listed in the following price guide. AnandTech does not sell positions on the Price Guide. AnandTech nor any of the vendors listed in this guide guarantee the prices presented in the following pages.

This Week
As usual, if you have any reports of incorrect prices please feel free to email us with the name of the vendor and the product/price that appears incorrectly on their website. This will help us produce a more useful guide in the future.

Since the release of the newest line of microprocessors including the Athlon XP2200+ as well as Intels line of Northwood chips, motherboard and chipset makers have also updated their designs to compliment these new speed demons. Among the new chipsets are VIA's KT333 for the AMD chips and Intel's 845 and 850 series. The charts from the last Motherboard and Memory Price Guides from November of last year have drastically changed

Also, with new high speed DDR designs being released, prices on older models continue to drop. Intel's added support for DDR type memory in its new line of chipsets will also help the DDR market.