Price Guides, February 2005: Motherboards

Other Deals

We wouldn't be able to write a guide without mentioning some of the other oddities in the motherboard land. Given the amount of Pentium M attention lately, some people may want to persue Prescott's little brother with a little more enthusiasm. Our analysis does not put the Pentium M ahead of the Athlon 64 (or even the Pentium 4) in most instances, and you still pay through the nose for hardware. DFI and AOpen both have first generation motherboards available, and the premiums on these boards are outrageous.

Prices have remained stagnant on both boards for several weeks and we probably won't see any change until the next generation motherboards start shipping.

Although SIS clearly lost the "oomph" they once had, we have seen some generally favorable products from them in recent history. The Price Engine bot picked up a lonely Foxconn SKU when searching for the SIS 755FX in retail space – the Foxconn 755FXK8AA-8EKRS [RTPE: 755FXK8AA-8EKRS].

At under $100 for a Socket 939 motherboard, Foxconn probably has a winner on their hands. However, it's going to take some more testing and benchmarks on our behalf to assure that the retail SIS 755FX boards have what it takes to stack up against nForce3 and K8T800.