Price Guides August 2003: CPUs, Motherboards, Memory and Video Cards

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.