Price Guides April 2004: Video Cards and Memory

On a less gleeful note, memory prices have continued to rise substantially over the past few months. This trend is showing price increases in the neighborhood of 20-30%. Only a few manufacturers have been able to keep costs in line, and they too are showing increases within the last couple weeks. These price increases appear to be undercutting the eventual release of DDR2 modules to the market. It would seem that memory manufacturers are intentionally tiering prices for DDR1-533 to be less appealing and competitive than DDR2-533 (although that is all just speculation).

Since the world will still keep spinning regardless of memory price hikes, we might as well enjoy the best the industry has to offer. If history is any teacher, we do not see memory prices decreasing anytime soon. With prices as difficult as they are, we will have to go back to our older method of recommendation; size over timings. If you overclock, timings are crucial to achieving high speeds, but for those of us who merely bump the clock a few MHz (or not at all), you are better off getting 1GB of slower timed memory than 512MB of low latency modules.

This week Kingston and PMI seem to have the best price/performance/size choices; 1GB (2x512) of value performance memory costs less than $200. You won't get much overclocking out of it, but 1GB is an ample amount to keep memory hogs like UT2K4 in their place. Prices are moving up very quickly; things are only going to get worse!