Price Guides August 2004: Video and Memory

DDR Memory

It's been a long time since DDR memory prices have seen fit to cut us some slack, and this week is yet again, no exception. Browsing through our own RealTime Pricing Engine shows a lot more red items in the deltas column; red indicating price rises. Unfortunately, even DDR2 still has a distance to go until it becomes something that can offer an alternative to the high cost-per-megabyte DDR1 chips have been seeing. On that note, DDR2 acceptance and adoption has been a little faster than some of us initially predicted, but it is a good bit off from becoming the de facto standard among desktop PCs.

In the meantime PC3200 memory shows the best available cost to performance ratio among the popular choices. If you're not going to be overclocking and are satisfied running at stock specifications, then the choices available are pretty much unlimited. This week the spotlight is pointing at Corsair and their PC-3200 512MB Value product. It won't win any awards or break any records in the DDR world but it will certainly get the job done quite well on the cheap. Even when overclocking is not a factor in your purchasing choice, it is still important to stick to larger brands that can offer the best prices including Corsair and Kingston. Remember your memory hierarchy; buy on SIZE, SPEED then LATENCY!

Kingston's HyperX PC-3200 512MB is one product that is worth consideration if overclocking is something you intend to do, or may do later on down the road. This CL2, 400MHz stick should run stably in most overclocked systems and comes with Kingston's lifetime warranty service.