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
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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.
Another good week for DDR shoppers. We are anxiously
anticipating both 800MHz FSB Intel CPU's and 400MHz FSB AMD CPU's.
After a short spring break we are back reporting guide information! The last
couple weeks have been particularly interesting for AMD chips with the advent
of the new KT400A chipset, as well as the announcements for 400MHz FSB chipset
solutions from VIA, NVIDIA and SIS. Remember, even though there were rumors
about AMD bringing the Barton chipset up to 400MHz, there has been very little
official word. It looks like 400MHz FSB is still several months away, but considering
333MHz FSB XP chips debuted not too long ago, we are a little disappointed in
such blatant planned obsolescence.
In other news, are are a little miffed about what is going on with the MP processor
arena as well. The official
AMD roadmap puts the 333MHz Barton MP and the Opteron processor out at the
same time. However, since there are no dual 333MHz AMD motherboard available,
we question how accurate this delivery time really is. Some people speculate
the AMD 760MPX will eventually be replaced by the rumored nForceFX chipset,
but information about this board has been very limited. Hopefully, some more
light can be shed on this situation in the upcoming weeks.
The Opteron processor's seem equally confusing. Microsoft announced only yesterday
that they will be announcing their 64-Bit Operating system for Itanium processors
on April 24. However, there has been no set date of release for Windows Server
2003 for the Opteron. Unless you plan on running Linux, Opteron's will only
run in 32-bit mode. Again, it looks like we will have to wait a few more weeks
to find out just exactly what is going on.
Onto more price oriented news, we saw another general decline in AMD processor
prices this week, with Palomino chips increasing in price. Since the Thoroughbred
B chips are undercutting the prices of these older Palominos, we plan on listing
only Barton and Thoroughbred B chips next week. We were a little surprised to
see how aggressive the Barton chips were priced after their debut. In fact,
the 2800+ Barton is now priced cheaper than the 2800+ Thoroughbred B 266MHz
FSB version. We are watching the Barton 2500+ chip closely since this will soon
become a very attractive overclocking chip since it runs on the 333MHz FSB,
and because it has that coveted 512kb cache. Unfortunately, if we see 400MHz
FSB Barton's poke their head around in May, the 333MHz offerings will most likely
drop into the sub-120USD range that the 266MHz Thoroughbred B's now reside.
For our recommended buy, we continue to suggest the XP 2100+ for value minded
buyers. At 87USD, it quantities
performs as well as the P4 2.0GHz for half the price. For the high end users,
the Barton 2500+ seems to be the way to go. The P4 2.4GHz chip has a slight
edge in performance, but you will save money on memory and a motherboard for
a complete system build if you go with the AMD processor. Somehow, resellers
are able to continue cutting prices on Duron chips, so if you planned on putting
together an HTPC or some other similar application, you still have a good processor
available to use.
If the AMD market seems messy this week, how about the Intel market? As you
probably know, Intel has been making a big deal of its Pentium-M,
Centrino, processor. Rumors indicate this chip might see action on the desktop
eventually, but it may be some time as Intel would then need to drop the "GHz"
rating system in order to do so. Whether it be on the desktop, or the laptop,
we will be seeing a lot more of the super-charged Pentium III Centrino processor
in the future.
There were very few unexpected price changes in the Intel sector. We are happy
to see the 2.53GHz processor under 200USD, and we currently recommend this a
good buy. For 20USD less, the 2.4BGhz processor also looks like a good buy right
now. Interestingly enough both the 400MHz FSB and the 533MHz FSB 2.4GHz Pentium
4 processors are priced the same. For those of you not familiar with Intel's
pricing, the 4th and 5th newest processor almost always seems to be the best
"bang for your buck." Usually we recommend AMD systems for people
looking for a mid-range system to build. If you take the cost of a decent 533MHz
motherboard (about 120USD) and a 2.4BGHz processor, you will get a better performing
combination than an nForce2 motherboard (about 120USD) coupled with an AMD XP
2600+ processor (210USD).
As we said earlier, both Intel and AMD are not sitting idle with news of some
of the newer price cuts and products. The month of April should bring interesting
news from both AMD and Intel. Right now, the performance gap between the two
chip makers is relatively small, but there is expectation that 800MHz FSB and
HyperThreading will put Intel on a much higher tier of performance. AMD has
its own tricks up its sleeve with 400MHz FSB and perhaps dual 333/400MHz FSB
solutions. Long term, a dual 333MHz FSB Athlon 2600+ solution might be more
cost effective than a 3.06GHz P4. In any case, AMD's Opteron and eventually
Athlon 64 will also throw even more competition Intel's way.
There has been a decent amount of news about DRAM prices actually increasing
after their six month spiral into prices today. From what we have seen, prices
are still on a downfall but not a significant in change as previous guides have
shown. It looks like prices will begin to stabilize in the upcoming weeks, but
we still forecast price drops in the higher clocked and lower CL rated memory.
Samsung was unable to provide comment for us about their DRAM prices, but there
has been much information about Micron
and Hynix lately.
The most notable changes this week include the "Uber-Deseriable"
Samsung modules dropping over 50% in price over a 1-month tracking period.
Eventually, within upcoming weeks we forecast PC2700 and PC2100 prices to sit
competitive with each other. We already have noticed PC2100 and PC2700 prices
dipping below prices of PC133 modules. Again, even though next week might bring
slightly lower prices, it is an excellent week to buy pretty much any module.
Our personal recommendations include the Kingston PC2700 512MB modules and
the Samsung PC3200 modules as well. Obviously, if your motherboard only supports
333MHz FSB, PC3200 is not necessary. You may have noticed we neglected to list
the "Twin" series memory modules. Don't let memory manufactures fool
you, there is no such thing as "Dual Channel DDR" sticks, they are
just regular DDR sticks that have been bundled together. From our original research,
we cannot seem to find any reason why the Corsair/Kingston/etc Twin modules
are any better than just buying two 256MB low latency sticks instead.
Even though the DDR prices are still plummeting into nothing, the RDRAM sector
has leveled off. Perhaps this is due to the upcoming release of 800MHz FSB Intel
chips, or maybe just because there are less players in the field. We recommend
buying multiple 800Mhz Samsung 256MB modules. If you have a SiS 655 motherboard,
you can take advantage of the Dual DDR interface, and save money. We don't recommend
buying 512MB modules for RDRAM unless you absolutely have to.
As always, feel free to email me, Kristopher,
for more product suggestions and any complaints or suggestions!
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