Price Guides August 2003: CPUs, Motherboards, Memory and Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on August 26, 2003 12:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Memory
It’s been a while since we posted much information on memory. The announcement of DDR500 (PC4000) came and went a few weeks ago. The mostly universal “who cares” followed shortly afterward.
Indeed, motherboards have been ramping up bus speed, so perhaps purchasing some of the faster PC3200 and PC3700 modules will result in an increase in speed, but remember there are several bottlenecks to consider. Traditionally, the marginal benefits of running DDR400 on a 333MHz Athlon processor do not justify the price. However, since the DDR400 standard seems to have solidified, a 512MB stick will cost you only 5-10% over DDR333 sticks.
Those with 865PE motherboards might be able to clock the bus up enough to make use of DDR500, but for most, DDR400 should suffice. Do keep in mind that both Intel and AMD systems can take advantage of dual channel memory. Purchasing two 256MB sticks will increase performance about 5% over the purchase of one 512MB stick.
PC3200 Value memory from Corsair, Crucial, Kingston and Samsung all seem priced in the $95 range for 512MB sticks. Better timed memory can squeeze slightly higher performance but you will probably end up paying around $140 per stick of 512MB PC3200. In our opinion, the large markups don’t justify the end performance enough.
Corsair continues to dominate market share at some of the online retailers, but Micron (Crucial) and Kingston still produce enough memory and OEM sales to keep costs extremely competitive. Mushkin recently expressed to us they are slashing prices as well, which should result in closer competition with the other big retail 3 memory brands.
Kingston, Crucial and Mushkin have participated in several interesting online-only promotions that we are able to pick up from time to time. Keep your eyes peel on the forums as these deals can get you some really low timing memory at the cost of value timed products. In fact, we just got confirmation from Mushkin that they will be holding an OEM overproduction special Labor Day weekend on their website only. It looks like they will be selling discount 512MB sticks of DDR PC3200 (2-2-2) Green. For you memory connoisseurs, this special memory is produced on Winbond BH-5 chips. Special thanks to all those who emailed me with the information!
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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.