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.

Get ready for some new additions this week! Please give us feedback! We always want to know how we can make the Price Guides the best they can be.

AMD CPU

As those of you following the Price Guides know, we’ve been adding several features to the guides.  Not only did we start denoting Editor’s Choice awards, but from now on we will also have a weekly PICKS; either based on value, or value/performance ratings each product.  We have also added a Manufacture’s info column so that anyone can easily reference product statistics against each other.  Although this isn’t extremely helpful for processors, anyone shopping for a Motherboard or a Video Card might like this new addition. 

We kind of jumped the gun 2 weeks ago when resellers started to take pre-orders on the XP 2400+ and the 2600+ processors.  Both chips are priced fairly high right now, but when they finally become available to everyone at the end of this month, anticipate price drops all over the board for AMD.  As far as we could tell, there are some very good deals out there, especially on the AMD 1600+ chip.  However, if you can wait the two or three weeks, you may be in for some dramatic price drops on all of the XP chips when the 2400+ and 2600+ finally hit the streets!

Intel CPU

This week was another fairly stable week for Intel CPU prices.  Now that the slower 533MHz chips have come down a lot in price, the 2.4B GHz P4 certainly has become very attractive.  If you’re building a new P4 system we highly recommend this chip.  Since the new Celeron chips just aren’t moving in price right now, we give our VALUE PICK of the week with the 1.8GHz Celeron.  Until the 2.0GHz Celeron comes down into the sub-$100 range you can bet the 1.8GHz chip is going to give the best performance/price out of all the Celerons.

Video Card

We cut out some of the GeForce4 cards from this week’s guides.  Pay particular attention to the VisionTek cards.  Since VisionTek stopped manufacturing cards almost 4 months ago, and then ran into financial troubles, there have been no new VisionTek cards in production.  Basically, any VT card you see on the market is the last of its kind! If you are a diehard VisionTek fan, this is most likely the last chance you’re going to get! Next week, we plan on pulling them off the guides and adding a wider array of ATI based cards.  Stay tuned next week for Motherboards and Memory Price Guides!