Price Guides December 2003: The Year in Component Prices
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 25, 2003 11:02 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
One of the things that hurt VIA the most was nForce2's "competitive" dual channel memory strategy. Although there were some cases where dual channel memory provided a performance increase over single channel, around February/March of 2003 people began to start realizing single channel controllers could in fact be just as competitive. After VIA lost that marketing war, the nForce2 boards had matured enough with onboard gigabit, digital coax/optical audio, and most importantly, integrated graphics. VIA recently announced its dual channel Socket A core logic, but with the advent of extremely cheap Athlon 64's, perhaps VIA is better off dropping its pursuit into the Athlon XP market and continuing doing what it is already doing the best; Athlon 64.
Even though competition between nForce3 and K8T800 has been pretty neck and neck so far, VIA seems slightly ahead of NVIDIA as far as price. There has been no shortage of adoption of either chip, but as you can see VIA has just a few more motherboard supporters.
VIA has a few key advantages over NVIDIA. Primarily, CK8 (nForce3) has been sitting on the shelves for years. Even at COMDEX 2002 we were already getting a little tired of hearing about the chip. VIA started fresh and did not debut into the mainstream market until the Athlon 64 announcements in September. Second, the largest issue VIA had in the K7 architecture was the memory controller, which AMD moved onto the processor for the K8. This also attributes to SiS, ALi and ATI's announcements to move into the AMD core logic sector.
With NVIDIA and VIA both announcing second generation Athlon 64 core logics at CES 2004 (next week), it will be interesting to see how the market heats up. SiS and ALi are still working to mainstream their first generation chips, and ATI hasn't even made their product publicly available yet.
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SUOrangeman - Monday, December 29, 2003 - link
The new 74Gb Raptor should be much cheaper and widely available from more popular vendors now (i.e., NewEgg).-SUO
Phiro - Monday, December 29, 2003 - link
You need to look a little lower, divide. I saw one for $194 I believe.divide_by_zero - Sunday, December 28, 2003 - link
Perhaps it is a function of live updating in prices but..."There are still some excellent NVIDIA cards. Our particular favorite, the GeForceFX 5900 NON-Ultra has been a spectacular sub-$200 card for several months now."
And on the chart they range from $239.00 to $281.00
eBauer - Saturday, December 27, 2003 - link
$217 is OEM, $240 is retail I believe.Pumpkinierre - Friday, December 26, 2003 - link
You had the A64 3000+ (512k L2) at $217 3 days ago and now you say its $240. I imagine demand would be great on this cpu but is there an error in your reporting?