Price Guides August 2003: CPUs, Motherboards, Memory and Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on August 26, 2003 12:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
AMD Motherboards
VIA KT600 motherboards started to show up at some of the larger distributors this week. Particularly, ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte boards are hitting the mainstream segment. While VIA has been scaling up, NVIDIA has been scaling down with single channel releases of its nForce2 chipset. Releases of these motherboards have been limited in quantity, and it will still be a couple weeks before they hit full force to the rest of the market.
The nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards continue to dominate the price / performance ratio this week, although we do not particularly see much difference between the Ultra 400 and older nForce2 chipsets. Keep in mind that only the Athlon XP 3200+ is capable of 400MHZ FSB, so unless you are a die hard overclocker, the 400MHz bus will not matter anyway.
VIA KT600 motherboards are starting to compete with the nForce2 motherboards but still cost about 10-25% extra. Given a few weeks it may become a more attractive chipset if the bigger motherboard companies are able to undercut the price on nForce2. Interestingly enough, KT400A motherboards seem to have disappeared as soon as they showed up on the motherboard scene. DFI’s LanParty KT400A appears to be the most available unit, but considering the availability of nForce2 and KT600, why bother?
Among our favorites, we still recommend the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. These motherboards ship with the nForce2 chipset but are overclockable to well over 400MHz, giving us the indication that the nForce2 Ultra 400 version of the motherboard is probably identical. Also, don’t forget the very capable EPoX 8RDA+ won our editor’s choice back in November as well.
We threw in one Opteron motherboard, the ASUS nForce3 SK8N. The prices on Opteron boards has been dropping recently, and since it looks more and more like AthlonMP’s days are numbered, we will continue to focus more on Opteron releases over AthlonMP.
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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.