Price Guides December 2003: The Year in Component Prices

In December 2002, there were not very many choices as far as Intel motherboards go.  SiS and Intel were both battling it out over the 533FSB market with i845PE and SiS 648 although Intel was clearly coming out ahead.  Intel's extremely short lived Granite Bay chipset came and went with a 5 month product cycle; certainly a trend we would not like to see occur too often.  Many of you might also remember Intel's sneaky move where they put all 865PE advertisements and announcements under non-disclosure agreements even though the boards sat on store shelves.  As a result, the near identical performance of 865PE and 875P boards succumbed to clever marketing and 875P boards flew off the shelves.

Seven months later, not nearly as many motherboards companies have unlocked 865PE chips left and there actually is a performance difference between 865PE and 875P.  The bigger Tier 2 companies (Abit, DFI, Albatron) should still have enough unlocked 865PE chips to continue their board production, but that has yet to be confirmed.