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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Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 27, 2003 - link
Monarch all prices at $30. I don't think it's a bug, since it affects no other merchant. If you follow the link the real price is revealed at the true rate (which isn't $30, trust me).I say it is no coincidence, and would rather see true pricing from honest merchants.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 27, 2003 - link
Many of the prices from Monarch Computers Systems have the price listed as $30 which is wrong. This includes several Intel and AMD processors. Maybe a bug?KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, August 27, 2003 - link
Hi #4, thanks for the input. I will add a bunch more NVIDIA cards today.Kristopher
Anonymous User - Wednesday, August 27, 2003 - link
Hey in the nVidia based video card pricelist you forgot to mention the eVGA 5900 card its alot cheaper than the Albatron's 5900! The Albatron is 343$ at GameVE, but the eVGA 5900 its 249$!!KristopherKubicki - Wednesday, August 27, 2003 - link
I am going to delist Compubuzz.comAnonymous User - Tuesday, August 26, 2003 - link
How do you select vendors "with generally positive feedback from a decent number of consumers"? It seems that compubuzz.com has a lot of unfavorable feedback at resellerratings.com, yet they managed to grab half of the AMD CPU listings in this guide...Anonymous User - Tuesday, August 26, 2003 - link
Is there a good way to find low profile memory?