Price Guides November 2003: Video Cards and Memory

Analyzing the memory market is like pulling teeth; it is just painful. PC2100 decreased another 5% or so while prices were supposedly on the increase, but now prices have corrected themselves back to their original values.  Our guess is last months correction was simply delayed as sources dried up.  Corsair took the most aggressive reproach to the price hikes and officially cut prices on all the PC2100 products.

Looking at PC2700 is a slightly different story.  The PC2700 modules are stuck in the price hikes from last month and prices are generally increasing or staying flat.  Since the PC2700 has mirrored what the PC2100 market does for the last 10-12 months, prices are probably leveling out to where they were a month or so ago.  Expect PC2700 to climb or stay even for a few more weeks.

PC3200 gets a little more exciting.  Prices on PC3200 have climbed a dollar or two here and there, but with the exception of the heavily regulated Crucial and Corsair modules, PC3200 modules are almost 20-30% off last months prices.  Mushkin seems the hardest hit, dropping prices to under $90 on its slower timed 512MB lines.

Just to make my job a little more difficult, PC3500 did exactly the opposite PC3200 did.  OCZ and GeIL, pretty much the only two companies still pursuing PC3500 (if you consider GeIL doing anything that is), both randomly hiked costs about $10 on all of their modules.  OCZ has been extremely aggressive in all of its other pricings, the hike on PC3500 was somewhat unexpected. 

Getting back to what is good to buy and what isn’t, PC3200 looks like the only real solution right now.  You pay approximately a $10 premium over PC2700, but DDR400 is more forgiving and easier to overclock than the PC2700 solutions.  And for those of you who have problematic i875P motherboards, check out Evan’s analysis of 875P and memory from a few months ago.  Most companies have produced hardware and firmware fixes for their boards so the timing problems of yore have diminished slightly.  Our recommendation this week goes to multiple Mushkin PC3200 512MB or Corsair 256MB sticks for i875/i865 boards (remember to take advantage of dual channel DDR).  Since the performance of dual channel DDR isn’t as significant with nForce2, and VIA doesn’t even support dual channel technology, buying single PC3200/PC2700 sticks makes more sense from an AMD perspective.  Mushkin’s PC3200 512MB sticks are again a good recommendation.