Price Guides April 2005: Motherboards

Introduction

Welcome back to another edition of the Price Guides. For those of you who need some advice on new motherboards, we have a complete look at today’s market segment along with our recommended picks. As another reminder, the RealTime Price Guides will be leaving the beta testing phase, and moving into production real soon! Please send us your comments and suggestions on how we can improve our engine. Of course, you can always view the existing release of the engine here.

We have been real busy over the last few weeks improving the engine for final deployment. Since our last motherboard update, we have added logical “NOT” searches, an improved developer RSS feed and tons of new products. Currently, our developers are working on tweaking the system to differentiate between retail and OEM products.

Over the last few weeks, we found a couple of bugs in the RSS feed, but those should all be fixed by now (apparently, RSS has strict interpretations on ampersands). For those interested, the official QuickSearch RSS feed forum thread is here.

nForce4 (AMD) motherboards are starting to show some actual maturity with decent driver and BIOS releases, and PCIe video cards are starting to really show headway against their AGP counterparts. Finally, we also have some PCIe options for Socket 754. Intel motherboards are about to undergo another revision in the next couple of weeks, and Anand had a small preview of 955X during the Dual Core Intel launch last week. Even though the 945/955 Intel northbridge revisions are just revisions on the existing 915/925 platform, the existing platform will not support dual core processors; so if dual core chips are important to you, don’t get stuck with an old motherboard.