Price Guides September 2003 IDF Edition: CPU, Motherboards and Video Cards
by Anand Shimpi & Laura Johnston on September 18, 2003 2:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
This week you may notice we are listing week changes in our guide. These week changes are reflections of the lowest price this week versus the lowest price last week. Our week deltas should keep product prices in better perspective for everyone. Even though the data in each table is generated in real time, don’t forget to check out our in house RealTime Price Guide which will tell you deltas for each product and merchant in our database!
It has certainly been an interesting week for CPU, motherboards, and video cards. In fact, it’s been at least 12 months since we had so many exciting things to report at once! The obvious question on everyone’s mind is what impact Athlon 64 FX is going to have on existing processor prices. From past processor releases, we would expect Athlon XP prices to drop. However, let us consider Opteron and Athlon MP. Opteron is easily replacing the Athlon MPs but even after 3 months we have not seen much price dip in the ill fated line.
As the Athlon 64 release draws near (September 23), resellers are not simply putting their chips on fire sale. Although it seems logical that resellers would want to eliminate their old inventory of XP processors, the lack of price cuts makes us wonder if resellers seem almost unconvinced that Athlon 64 will be the success that it needs to be. In fact, two of our most listed merchants, NewEgg and ZipZoomFly (formerly Googlegear), increased prices on all XP chips.
On an interesting side note, all Opteron prices dropped $10 - $15 bucks this week (again). Granted, even the moderate performing 240 Opteron are still expensive at $260. As we have said before though, the Opteron series has been very effective at replacing the Athlon MP. While this week the Opteron 240 and Athlon MP 2800+ are priced about the same, it’s easy to imagine the Opteron 240 priced less than the 2800+ and the 2600+ by Q4.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
17 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Kristopher, #16 again. These quotes were taken from the original AnandTech reviews of nForce2 technology."Remember the 12% boost in bandwidth we saw on the nForce2 by going to DDR400? That 12% increase in bandwidth comes at the cost of a 22% increase in latency! The increase in latency is not only due to the slower memory timings DDR400 modules run at but also because the memory bus is no longer synchronous with the FSB when running in DDR400 mode whereas DDR333 matches up perfectly with the new 333MHz Athlon XP FSB."
"There's no increase in latency when going from a single channel DDR333 to a dual channel DDR333 setup on the nForce2 platform. There is a slight increase when making the same transition with DDR400 because we had to increase some of the timing delays in order to run two channels of DDR400 with the nForce2 while maintaining stability."
"As we proved in our original review of the nForce chipset, the bandwidth gained from going to dual channel DDR doesn't help unless you're sharing main memory bandwidth with an integrated GPU. In this case we're not and we'll be focusing on IGP performance in a later article, so we can disregard the two 128-bit nForce2 solutions for the rest of this comparison. We also have a balanced FSB/memory bus setup, meaning we have as much bandwidth going to our CPU as we do to main memory, so increasing memory bandwidth without similarly increasing FSB bandwidth would inherently yield poor returns as we're FSB limited at that point."
Thus, unless the board is capable of running dual-channel in full synchronous mode at 400MHz+ at tight timings, there does not seem to be any advantage. And then again, how many boards that can do this fall into the "half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards" category?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 23, 2003 - link
Kristopher, in answer to your question in #12, how about "official" support of 400MHz front side bus.Anonymous User - Sunday, September 21, 2003 - link
yeah nforce 400 (single chanel) are good performers.I also have a soltek sl-nv400-64 and by some benchmarks they performe better than a dual channel bord.
So please dont advise not to buy them...
Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link
Where's those 9800np's? Can't find them, can you? (Are you gonna link to Best Buy?)Anonymous User - Saturday, September 20, 2003 - link
Don't dance around the subject if you yourself want to come out as substantiated.KristopherKubicki - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
#10 (and #3): That is a ridiculous and totally unsubstantiated comment. What (in your opinion) does the NV400 bring to the table that the other half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards dont?Kristopher
Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
Don't buy a single-channel NForce 2 400 board after Anandtech themselves reviewed the Soltek NV-400 as one of the fastest Athlon solutions?!?!Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
Perhaps a reason for all this dual-channel advocacy is that quite a few reviewers are actually Intel oriented and fail to see the picture clearly about current AMD system boards.Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
#5 I want to know that myself. I'm holding off strickly to buy the 9800XT as soon as it's released, but it's getting tough to hold off. I'm dying for information about this card and scour the net daily now looking for new info.TheSnowman - Thursday, September 18, 2003 - link
i saw plenty of 9800nps at best buy the other day.