This week you may notice we are listing week changes in our guide.  These week changes are reflections of the lowest price this week versus the lowest price last week.  Our week deltas should keep product prices in better perspective for everyone.  Even though the data in each table is generated in real time, don’t forget to check out our in house RealTime Price Guide which will tell you deltas for each product and merchant in our database!

It has certainly been an interesting week for CPU, motherboards, and video cards.  In fact, it’s been at least 12 months since we had so many exciting things to report at once!  The obvious question on everyone’s mind is what impact Athlon 64 FX is going to have on existing processor prices.  From past processor releases, we would expect Athlon XP prices to drop.  However, let us consider Opteron and Athlon MP.  Opteron is easily replacing the Athlon MPs but even after 3 months we have not seen much price dip in the ill fated line. 

As the Athlon 64 release draws near (September 23), resellers are not simply putting their chips on fire sale.   Although it seems logical that resellers would want to eliminate their old inventory of XP processors, the lack of price cuts makes us wonder if resellers seem almost unconvinced that Athlon 64 will be the success that it needs to be.  In fact, two of our most listed merchants, NewEgg and ZipZoomFly (formerly Googlegear), increased prices on all XP chips. 

On an interesting side note, all Opteron prices dropped $10 - $15 bucks this week (again).  Granted, even the moderate performing 240 Opteron are still expensive at $260.  As we have said before though, the Opteron series has been very effective at replacing the Athlon MP. While this week the Opteron 240 and Athlon MP 2800+ are priced about the same, it’s easy to imagine the Opteron 240 priced less than the 2800+ and the 2600+ by Q4.

Intel CPU
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  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    You could have gotten the motherboard Evan gave the Editors Choice to for $79, the EPoX 8RDA+

    http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1759&am...

  • DBaron - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    Whats wrong with the Nforce single channel boards? I was all set to buy a Soltek NV400, till I read this article. It seems like a good mobo for the price , and its fairly inexpensive too...76 at new egg. Is there something I am missing?
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    geez can anyone say WHEN the 9800XT NDA will lift or is that NDA too. >:(
  • KristopherKubicki - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    #3: We will add some more 9800 NP cards. They didnt really dissappear, just resellers all decided to reorganize their SKUs are the same time.

    KT600 and nForce2 are priced about the same and perform about the same. Dual Channel memory is the largest difference between the two. If it doesnt cost you anything more, why not?

    Kristopher
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    R9800 (non pro) is becoming widely available and should not be replaced by R9800SE becauase that's a cut down garbage version that should not be allowed to bear the R9800 name...

    A question on the article. Why stress the fact that The KT600 boards are single channel, when dual channel does so very little for SocketA boards in general? When looking at practical performance it basically doe not do much good at all. I'm objecting because so many people looking for motherboards believe the myth that dual channel is an important feature. Don't keep it alive.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    I thought the 9800np were pretty much OEM cards like for Dell, etc? I didn't think the 9800np was nearly as common as the 9700np, 9500np, etc...

    I imagine the 9800SE will replace the non pro though.
  • Anonymous User - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link

    No comment about the disappearance of the ATI 9800 non-pro cards?

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