Price Guides August 2003: CPUs, Motherboards, Memory and Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on August 26, 2003 12:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Welcome back to the weekly price guides! It’s been a couple weeks so after our brief vacation a lot of things have changed. As you will see this week, we have a lot of new products along with many price changes. To get back into swing, we will look at Processors, Motherboards, Memory and Video Cards. As always, don’t forget to check our RealTime Price Guides for the most up to date prices and products.
AMD Processors
The largest disappointment for AMD has been the lack of scalability on their 400MHz FSB processors. Try as we might, we still cannot find any 400FSB processors with the exception of the incredibly overpriced XP 3200+. There is still some good news though, as prices on the whole have dropped quite a bit in the last month. Our particular favorite, the Barton 2500+ continues to drop in price. Remember, the Barton core doubles the L2 cache over the Thoroughbred core. We also begin to take interest in the XP 2700+ chips, as they are also dropping in price. Once this processor drops below the $100 mark it will oust the 2500+ as our overall chip of choice.
AMD’s announcement of the Opteron 246 cut other Opteron prices about 10% overnight. The Opteron 240 continues to drop as well. Considering the recent drops in nForce3 motherboards, Opteron 240 solutions look to outperform Athlon MP 2800+ solutions, at least on the single processor workstations. Motherboard prices unfortunately hurt the further propagation on Opteron processors, but as more companies begin to adopt nForce3 and other core logic Opteron will quickly phase out Athlon MP.
Is AMD’s Athlon64 announcement around the corner? If quantities of the Athlon64 remain high after the September announcement, distributors will probably react with a firesale of the old Athlon MP and XP as they have done with other AMD lines. Unfortunately, it’s still too early to tell what will occur.
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StayPuff - Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - link
It seems that every item listed for GameVE is out of stock -- at least the ones I checked....Bummer.
KristopherKubicki - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
Hi,Still working some bugs out. Thanks for the update, I promise I will have this working very soon.
Kristopher
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
argh definitely you got a problem... all memory prices are 0.0 just OCZ is 2.95 which is also wrong obviously...your bots messed up?
Prices last updated Sep 5, 2003 at 12:45 PM
and were not updated right certainly.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 5, 2003 - link
something's gone wrong... i dont see any ati cards listed right now, and your real time price engine doesnt have videocards in it too...Anonymous User - Wednesday, September 3, 2003 - link
Kris you are still forgetting the eVGA 5900 thats 249$ at GameVeKristopherKubicki - Saturday, August 30, 2003 - link
#11 - Yeah, go for the Pro versions. Definately good cards. Their drivers are fine.Kristopher
Anonymous User - Friday, August 29, 2003 - link
I have heard that ATI should be avoided due to bad drivers and such, thus causing problems with gaming. However, ATI seems so attrative right now. Should I go for the 9500/9600??KristopherKubicki - Thursday, August 28, 2003 - link
I just wanted to mention real quick, if the merchants seem drastically wrong, its a problem on our end not the merchants. All of the merchants are browsed by AnandTech bots, rather than grabbed from some PriceWatch database (or something of the like). Sometimes, if a every price on a merchant is off, their webpage probably changed.The problem we had was that the MonarchComputer webpage changed, and since one of our interns was logged into the system it never warned us. The resulting error was every Monarch link was posted at 30 bucks. For those of you who track the system closely, this happened to another merchant about 2 weeks ago before we put the warnings in.
In anycase, we have multiple levels of monitoring now, we should be in much better shape for these occurances.
Thanks for your patience!
Kristopher
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, August 28, 2003 - link
#7 / #8, this is a temporary bug on our end. Something really silly (like an editor forgetting to log out of the price guide backend). We have put stops in to prevent this from happening again.Thanks for the input!
Kristopher
Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 27, 2003 - link
Agree with previous comment about Monarch. Credibility of the price guide suffers when hijacked by unscrupulous vendors. Anandtech ought to "filter" out such listings.