Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1130
Price Guides August 2003: CPUs, Motherboards, Memory and Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on August 26, 2003 12:56 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Introduction
For those of you not familiar with the guides here is a brief overview on
how we construct them:
We select vendors to appear in our Price Guides based on two requirements: solid consumer feedback and having the lowest possible pricing. You'll notice that these vendors aren't paying us to be listed here; we do not accept requests to be listed here. We have tried to eliminate vendors with low feedback rating, but we do encourage you to do your own research before purchasing from any of these vendors.
If there are any problems with the guide or a vendor's pricing changes dramatically then be sure to email the author listed at the top of the page and we'll take appropriate action. Remember that although some vendors may be cheaper, we only list those with generally positive feedback from a decent number of consumers. As usual, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to email us or post in the AnandTech Forums.
Also be sure to check out AnandTech's Hot Deals Forum for even more great CPUs, Video Cards and other technology buys.
Disclaimer
AnandTech does not endorse any vendor listed in the following price guide.
AnandTech does not sell positions on the Price Guide. AnandTech
nor any of the vendors listed in this guide guarantee the prices presented
in the following pages.
This Week
As usual, if you have any reports of incorrect prices please feel free to
email us with the name of the vendor and the product/price that appears incorrectly
on their website. This will help us produce a more useful guide in the future.
Welcome back to the weekly price guides! It’s been a couple weeks so after our brief vacation a lot of things have changed. As you will see this week, we have a lot of new products along with many price changes. To get back into swing, we will look at Processors, Motherboards, Memory and Video Cards. As always, don’t forget to check our RealTime Price Guides for the most up to date prices and products.
AMD Processors
The largest disappointment for AMD has been the lack of scalability on their 400MHz FSB processors. Try as we might, we still cannot find any 400FSB processors with the exception of the incredibly overpriced XP 3200+. There is still some good news though, as prices on the whole have dropped quite a bit in the last month. Our particular favorite, the Barton 2500+ continues to drop in price. Remember, the Barton core doubles the L2 cache over the Thoroughbred core. We also begin to take interest in the XP 2700+ chips, as they are also dropping in price. Once this processor drops below the $100 mark it will oust the 2500+ as our overall chip of choice.
AMD’s announcement of the Opteron 246 cut other Opteron prices about 10% overnight. The Opteron 240 continues to drop as well. Considering the recent drops in nForce3 motherboards, Opteron 240 solutions look to outperform Athlon MP 2800+ solutions, at least on the single processor workstations. Motherboard prices unfortunately hurt the further propagation on Opteron processors, but as more companies begin to adopt nForce3 and other core logic Opteron will quickly phase out Athlon MP.
Is AMD’s Athlon64 announcement around the corner? If quantities of the Athlon64 remain high after the September announcement, distributors will probably react with a firesale of the old Athlon MP and XP as they have done with other AMD lines. Unfortunately, it’s still too early to tell what will occur.
Intel Processors
Intel pumped out another clocked up Celeron a couple weeks ago to increase their line up to 2.6GHz. Intel debuted this processor at a lower price than their low end 1.7GHz processor, but don’t expect much on performance due to the low cache size and low bus speed.
Intel’s prices on their Pentium 4 line remain relatively high. After the P4 3.2GHz debut, the lower end P4 prices remained stagnant. AMD prices dropped dramatically, so perhaps Intel is taking a week or two off before correcting their prices as well.
The last few weeks have been pretty silent on Intel’s side of the feild. We continue our recommendation for i865PE boards and 2.4GHz 800FSB Pentium 4’s. Since they are a great blend of performance and cost, do not be surprised if this continues to warrant our recommendation (at least, until AMD cooks up something a little more powerful).
AMD Motherboards
VIA KT600 motherboards started to show up at some of the larger distributors this week. Particularly, ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte boards are hitting the mainstream segment. While VIA has been scaling up, NVIDIA has been scaling down with single channel releases of its nForce2 chipset. Releases of these motherboards have been limited in quantity, and it will still be a couple weeks before they hit full force to the rest of the market.
The nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards continue to dominate the price / performance ratio this week, although we do not particularly see much difference between the Ultra 400 and older nForce2 chipsets. Keep in mind that only the Athlon XP 3200+ is capable of 400MHZ FSB, so unless you are a die hard overclocker, the 400MHz bus will not matter anyway.
VIA KT600 motherboards are starting to compete with the nForce2 motherboards but still cost about 10-25% extra. Given a few weeks it may become a more attractive chipset if the bigger motherboard companies are able to undercut the price on nForce2. Interestingly enough, KT400A motherboards seem to have disappeared as soon as they showed up on the motherboard scene. DFI’s LanParty KT400A appears to be the most available unit, but considering the availability of nForce2 and KT600, why bother?
Among our favorites, we still recommend the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. These motherboards ship with the nForce2 chipset but are overclockable to well over 400MHz, giving us the indication that the nForce2 Ultra 400 version of the motherboard is probably identical. Also, don’t forget the very capable EPoX 8RDA+ won our editor’s choice back in November as well.
We threw in one Opteron motherboard, the ASUS nForce3 SK8N. The prices on Opteron boards has been dropping recently, and since it looks more and more like AthlonMP’s days are numbered, we will continue to focus more on Opteron releases over AthlonMP.
Intel Motherboards
Even though SiS very quietly released the 648FX and 655FX versions of their chipsets, Intel continues to dominate the spotlight. You really can’t lose with the i865PE chipset. Don’t forget to check out our 865PE/875P roundup, where we find that the 865PE boards actually outperform some of the 875P solutions.
It should be mentioned that 533MHz FSB SiS motherboards dropped almost 40% over a two month period. However, 800MHz FSB SiS 655FX and 648FX boards remain expensive and limited in quantity; the battle looks to be over for the 800MHz Pentium 4 lineup. Perhaps SiS has something up their sleeve for Prescott.
With Intel motherboards, there are dozens of good choices. Both the Albatron PX865PE and the Abit IS7 performed well in our 865PE/875P roundup and cost around $100. ASUS’s P4P800 Deluxe also continues to be a favorite among users in our forum, but the extra features end up costing you around $130. Again, we really do not see a reason to go with 875P, so your money is better spent on more features in an 865PE motherboard.
Memory
It’s been a while since we posted much information on memory. The announcement of DDR500 (PC4000) came and went a few weeks ago. The mostly universal “who cares” followed shortly afterward.
Indeed, motherboards have been ramping up bus speed, so perhaps purchasing some of the faster PC3200 and PC3700 modules will result in an increase in speed, but remember there are several bottlenecks to consider. Traditionally, the marginal benefits of running DDR400 on a 333MHz Athlon processor do not justify the price. However, since the DDR400 standard seems to have solidified, a 512MB stick will cost you only 5-10% over DDR333 sticks.
Those with 865PE motherboards might be able to clock the bus up enough to make use of DDR500, but for most, DDR400 should suffice. Do keep in mind that both Intel and AMD systems can take advantage of dual channel memory. Purchasing two 256MB sticks will increase performance about 5% over the purchase of one 512MB stick.
PC3200 Value memory from Corsair, Crucial, Kingston and Samsung all seem priced in the $95 range for 512MB sticks. Better timed memory can squeeze slightly higher performance but you will probably end up paying around $140 per stick of 512MB PC3200. In our opinion, the large markups don’t justify the end performance enough.
Corsair continues to dominate market share at some of the online retailers, but Micron (Crucial) and Kingston still produce enough memory and OEM sales to keep costs extremely competitive. Mushkin recently expressed to us they are slashing prices as well, which should result in closer competition with the other big retail 3 memory brands.
Kingston, Crucial and Mushkin have participated in several interesting online-only promotions that we are able to pick up from time to time. Keep your eyes peel on the forums as these deals can get you some really low timing memory at the cost of value timed products. In fact, we just got confirmation from Mushkin that they will be holding an OEM overproduction special Labor Day weekend on their website only. It looks like they will be selling discount 512MB sticks of DDR PC3200 (2-2-2) Green. For you memory connoisseurs, this special memory is produced on Winbond BH-5 chips. Special thanks to all those who emailed me with the information!
Video ATI
Everyone seems to be jumping on the ATI bandwagon. The Radeon line basically doubled over the last couple months, but their aggressive and dominating market position assures that prices wont be taking a dive anytime soon. The Radeon 9800 256MB line started to show itself a few weeks ago as well, but realistically we don’t expect this card to start flying off the shelves at $400.
However, even though the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro is hard to find, ATI still has exceptional offerings. The Sapphire 9500 Pro and the Sapphire 9700 Pro still offer excellent performance for under $200 and under $300, respectively. If finding 9500 Pro cards prove difficult, you might consider the Radeon 9600 Pro which offers slightly less performance at a slightly lower cost than the 9500 Pro.
Video NVIDIA
Those wonderful GeForceFX 5800’s are all but impossible to find. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, ATI took the price for this week’s price/performance winner. The Radeon 9600 Pro seems to outpace the GeForceFX 5600 Ultra, while costing 10 to 15 dollars less.
The high end GeForce FX5900's display enough performance to give ATI a run for its money, but at an inhibitive cost. We could not find any 5900 Ultra cards under $400, which seems like a ridiculous amount to spend on a video card. If perhaps ATI is not your cup of tea, the prices on the GeForceFX 5600 Ultra are dropping, so when they get down to the $160 range they will become a most cost effective solution.
In other video news, Matrox quietly unveiled its 256MB revision on the Parhelia. However, like NVIDIA and ATI’s high end solutions, the cost of this video card is slightly out of reach of anyone with reasonable video card expectations.
Don’t forget, you can view all of our real-time pricings whenever you wish. Simply click “RealTime Pricing” on the AnandTech left navigation bar, or click here.
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