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
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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.
There were loots of changes this week in the AMD CPU section. Also, we took a look at some of the plummeting DDR prices!
This week's price guides brings us to an interesting point that came to my
attention last week. As most of you know, there are two different versions of
AMD XP chips on the market right now, the Palomino and Thoroughbred cores. The
Palomino cores are the older, 0.18 micron cores, while the Thoroughbreds are
the newer, 0.13 micron cores. Even though the Palominos are getting phased out,
resellers seem to think it is OK to not list whether or not they are selling
you a 0.13um or 0.18um cored processor. Going into a little research on the
subject, we found a lot of 'interesting' practices occurring among resellers
(and not just little ones). So how do you know what processor you are getting?
First of all, check to see if it is listed as Palomino or Thoroughbred. Sometimes
resellers do not make it obvious. Or, some do not even list it at all! Your
next step is to see if they listed an AMD SKU number. Palomino XP's usually
start AX while the Thoroughbred chips start AXDA. When looking around at SKU
numbers, we tended to see this one often: AXP1700BOX. Do not let resellers deceive
you; that is NOT a valid AMD SKU. Every few months AMD puts out a massive chart
giving a nice overview on every one of their chips (SKU, core temperature, etc).
If you have a few minutes, check out this great link on AMD's website. Our final
words of warning, do NOT assume that a reseller is selling a Palomino or Thoroughbred
CPU based on the picture. We try to screen our resellers as best as possible,
but several websites publish misleading information on their sites.
Furthermore, we have a few more announcements to make about some of our product
listings. We used to list a company called GameVE.com fairly regularly. There
seems to be isolated incidents with any reseller, but GameVE appears to be a
site that stopped fulfilling our needs as a reseller to list in our guides,
regardless of their prices. Recently, within the last 3 to 4 weeks, we have
noticed an unacceptable amount of complaints about GameVE. Since their listed
email address does not even work, we are suspending GameVE's listings from our
price engine.
Concerning processors, this was one of the better weeks we have seen for AMD
processors in a while. Last week, we were slightly incorrect in stating that
there were not going to be any new AMD workstation chips until Athlon 64 comes
out. Even though Athlon 64 got pushed back for a release until fall, we will
still have the Barton core XP chips hitting the market next week. High end XP
processors prices dropped like a rock over the last week; a trend that should
continue for several more weeks. Most vendors are posting pre-orders for XP
2800+ and 3000+ chips with an ETA of around Feb 7, so expect to see this chips
hit the streets over the weekend. The mid ranged XP chips appeared to have not
moved at all since last week, but remember we split the Palomino and Thoroughbred
cores into two different categories now. Vendors are telling us that the Palomino
chips are drying up fast, so hopefully in the next few weeks we will not even
have to worry about tracking them. Be warned, as we stated earlier, that you
do not buy at Palomino chip unless you really want one. The Thoroughbred chips
run much cooler and if overclocking is your thing, you definately do not want
the Palomino core.
For this week's AMD recommendation, we chose the XP 2100+ Thoroughbred. This
chip has great overclockability, good perfomance, and an awesome price. Unfortunately,
it still runs on the 266FSB, but consider that the XP 2600+ with 333FSB carries
a price tag three times that of the XP 2100+. The XP chip prices continue to
fall to extrodinary levels, and we expect them to continue falling even after
the Barton chips begin to hit shelves.
This week proved to be an extremely bland week as we accurately
predicted in our last installment of the guides. Since we recently delisted
one of our larger vendors, some of these prices were artificially inflated.
Other than that, not much new news in the Intel sector. Granite Bay boards
are becoming a little more mainstream, but as we saw in the MSI
SIS 655 MAX review, it looks like Intel has some serious competition until
Springdale. Next week when we post the Motherboard guide, we will have a few
Granite Bay boards listed, and if possible, a SIS 655 board or two.
This week was an incredible week for DDR prices. We mentioned
last week that DDR prices were down significantly from prices a few weeks
before. The price continues to bottom out on DRAM, hurting PC2700 especially.
Our choice for DDR is an easy choice, with 512MB modules of PC2700 hitting
all time lows. For those of you who have nForce2 boards, Dual Channel 2x512
Samsung PC2700 looks really attractive!
PC3700 DDR began to trickle into the market a little, with GeIL
and OCZ hitting the market first. Unfortunately(?), we could not find any
stores with a high enough rating to list all of OCZ's products this week.
You may note we added a few other manufacturers including the much requested
Crucial. Strangely, even though our bot crawls Crucial.com for memory prices,
they still have yet to beat their distributors's! We are a little curious
as to why Crucial does not seem to have any DDR above PC2700 on the market,
but we suppose that will change eventually. Next week we plan on adding even
more DDR so stay tuned!
RDRAM has always been a pain to track, but we are getting better
at it. Last week's guides we asked if anyone would like us to add a particular
RDRAM module please email Kristopher,
asking to do so. Surprisingly, we had two people email asking for certain
RDRAM modules. To put that in perspective, we had 8 emails asking us to add
the Epox 8RDA+ to the guides. What strikes us odd is that the 8RDA+ was already
on the guides! Next week we expect to have 16 and 32 bit modules at both speeds,
but it seems as if the manufacturers and resellers are staying away from RDRAM
like the plague. Mathematically, it seems as though Samsung 256MB modules
have a clear edge over everyone else. You can buy four 16bit Samsung 256MB
modules for the price of one Corsair 512MB! Next week we should have a better
look at some more RDRAM components, so please drop us feedback in the forums
or through email about what you want added!
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