Price Guides - January 2005: CPUs Galore

As always, welcome back to another installment of our price guides. A lot has been going on behind the scenes, so let's take a few minutes to recap. First off, feel free to check out our QuickSearch RSS feed to get a real time, abbreviated update on all of the best prices in our search engine. We are also approaching the final days of the open beta for the RealTime Price Engine Beta. The beta engine is a bit easier to search and contains more succinct data than the existing engine, and it also gives everyone the ability to suggest links for the database here. They both feed off the same bots, so it is just a matter of how you want to view your data. As always, comments and suggestions are extremely appreciated.

Remember that on the AnandTech Price Engine, the graphs and charts from each page continually update, although the content does not.

Introduction

CPUs have not generated very many spectacular launches in the last few months. Our initial report on the Pentium M on Linux briefly looked at the most recent Intel processor launch, but we have a full-blown Windows review as well in the next couple of days for those of you who are really interested in the P6+ architecture. Some of you may be interested to know that the 3.8GHz Prescott "570J" CPUs are now available, and we will touch on that more later. The 90nm Socket 939 Athlon 64s are also starting to stabilize, which has resulted in a very favorable trend for the entire Socket 939 platform.

Usually, we do two separate topics per guide, but we have so much to say about CPUs this week that we are spending this whole guide just talking about them. We have a large amount of information this week and we want to cover it thoroughly, so take your time and get a feel for all of the little subtleties in each chart.

In merchant news, you may be interested to hear that two of our major merchants, AxionTech and Directron, have merged. Sure enough, if you check the footer at the bottom of the AxionTech webpage, you will see the Directron copyright - and Directron's own website hinted at a bit of the merger within an upcoming sale. Congratulations to the new company and good luck in 2005.