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.

With the new and improved Price Guides we have not only increased our standards when evaluating online vendors, but we have also partnered up with our friends at CNet to offer yet another service to you all. Using CNet's Shopper.com search engine we can provide you with an additional pool of vendors to search from that are checked up on by CNet. You can wade through those results by clicking on the CNet Pricing link in the second to last column on the right.

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.

This looks like a good week for holiday shoppers!  We are particularly pleased to start listing nForce2 boards as they continue to make waves on the AMD side of hardware. 

Welcome back! Our apologies for the lack of guides lately, both finals and COMDEX have drained a lot out of us.  Fortunately, we have more guides coming up just in time for the holidays.  This week we added a small barrage of nForce2 boards and cleaned up the motherboard layout a little bit.

With the debut of the nForce2 boards, the KT333 and KT400 boards should really come down in price.  Since both of VIA’s chipsets cannot compete with nForce2 on a performance level, they will have to shoot for a more value oriented market.  If you absolutely must have a KT333/400 board for whatever reason, check out the special running on the SOYO boards as they both should have mail in rebates running.

For this week’s recommended AMD pick, we would have to suggest the EPoX 8RDA+.  Consistent with its award winning performance in the nForce2 shootout, EPoX has managed to undercut the price on almost all other available nForce2 boards.  Since KT400A is still a ways away, nForce2 is really the way to go right now.

We had a little trouble finding Granite Bay boards this week, but next week we should have an abundance of them.  As expected, the 845PE chipset seems to be the best buy this week.  If you are in the market for a motherboard over the holidays, the EPoX 4PEA+ really packs on a lot of features and can be found at a good price.  Also, we recommend the ASUS P4PE as another strong buy.

On the low end scale of things SiS seems to be slipping a bit as the 845E/PE boards seem to be slowly dropping in price.  In the upcoming weeks, they might get a chance to redeem themselves on the announcement of new chipsets. 

Memory prices seemed all over the board this week.  On the overall, most prices actually went up! We are a little dissapointed but after the 3 month drop in prices we somewhat expected the price to stabilize at somepoint.  This week, almost all of the retailers were cheaper than the manufactures websites.  However, with the unusual hike up in prices, you might be better off waiting a little before purchasing any memory upgrades. 

Kingston and GeIL seemed to have the most agressive pricing in terms of DDR this month.  Even though DDR seemed to go up in price, all of the RDRAM dropped in price.  RDRAM is still more expensive than DDR, but if their price continues to drop like it has, the two memory standards could easily start to give each other more competition.  Stay tuned for another installment of the guides later this week!