Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1179
Price Guides October 2003: CPU and Memory
by Kristopher Kubicki & Larry Barber on October 13, 2003 11:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Welcome back to another fun filled Price Guide. As you may know, we took a couple weeks off for Computex and midterms, but we are back in full swing. Of course, many of you probably recall the particular processor launch from late September, but what changes did we see on pricing? This week we look back again at CPU, Motherboards and Video Cards to see what surprises this week holds. As always, don’t forget you can check prices on our Hard Drives, Memory, CPU, Motherboards and Video Cards at anytime through our price engine. Furthermore, all of our price guide tables are reflective of real time prices, so don’t expect any outdated information in our tables.
AMD CPU
It appears with the release of the AMD Athlon 64 product line the prices of the Athlon XP line was negatively effected. With the exeption of the already over priced Athlon XP 3200+ all XP chips increased in price 5-10%. Fortunately, the Athlon 64 3200+ dipped way under its debut price to $404. Athlon 64 FX prices also dropped, but only slightly. If you need a 64 bit chip for whatever reason, the 3200+ is the better processor.
Before Computex, we also saw the fairly uneventful launch of the 1.6GHz Duron processor. AMD was supposed to phase this component out, but our guess is that Asian markets have continually spurred a demand for the processor. The Opteron line did not fluctuate in price at all since last week, although for the month the processors have dropped in price about 8%. As we predicted about a month ago, the Opteron line is set to begin undercutting the Athlon 2800+ MP and 2600+ MP lines by this time next month.
In our opinion it is not a particularly great time to buy an AMD system. Unstable XP prices coupled with Athlon 64 launch mean poor deals for at least 6 weeks until things calm down. Furthermore, the upcoming holidays usually bring several deals, so sit tight!
Intel CPU
There seems to be two very important announcements in this week’s Intel analysis. First of all, we still can’t find Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPUs. Rumor on the streets is that the chip will debut at almost $1,000 retail, which really is unfortunate considering its uncommon performance. Perhaps Intel will decide to bump up the FSB and clock rate of the Xeon line in the near future and thus bring the price of both chips down.
It seems sources of 533FSB processors are severely drying up. As a result, most 533FSB CPU’s increased in price, some more than 10%. True to Intel’s word, the 800FSB Pentium 4’s only have about a 10 dollar premium on their 533FSB counterparts, although we somewhat expected the 800FSB chips to fall in price, rather than the 533FSB CPU’s increase.
However, that’s not to say the Intel lineup isn’t void of all good deals. Our particular favorite the 2.4GHz 800FSB chip took a slight jump from $165 last week, but even at $174 it is still a bargain. The 2.6GHz 800FSB is not a bad looking chip either, with only a $20 premium over the 2.4GHz version.
DDR Memory
Memory is often something we overlook when writing our guides. Afterall, what good is a 3GHz CPU if you don’t have any good memory for it? Right now, we only list the cheapest timings per clock and size for each memory vendor, but soon enough we will be expanding our guides once again to take each timing into account. However, overall we can see some interesting trends in our memory prices.
The PC2100 1GB sticks were the only modules that showed major change this week. However, even with a $30 drop in price, $265 is still a bit much to be paying for two $80 512MB sticks of memory glued together. As you can probably tell, any memory clocked under PC3200 is priced about the same. Unless you have an overclocked P4 this wont matter much anyways.
While at a recent tradeshow we heard several complaints from the memory manufacturers on how quickly prices spun out of control. Considering that decent timed PC3200 costs about the same as equivalent PC2100, we are not surprised manufacturers are upset. Memory continues to be a buyers market, even with some products occasionally correcting themselves. PC4000 and higher memory seems extremely silly right now, considering no processor other than well overclocked P4’s will be able to take full advantage of the bus speed benefits.
Is a correction due? Let’s just say with the relatively low prices of high end memory, we shouldn’t expect manufacturers to plummet prices like PC3200 and PC2700. On the other hand, memory manufacturers debuted PC4000 (and higher) way too early. If the product is on shelves for 9-12 months before the mass markets can take full advantage of it, does it make sense to assume it will just sit at the MSRP before resellers start slashing prices? Stay tuned tomorrow as we are going to bring you a second installment of the guides with Video Cards and Motherboards!
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