Weekly Memory and Motherboard Price Guide: 4th Edition

Introduction

It's Friday, and that means that the weekly price guide is here. This is the 4th edition, and this week we will concentrate on memory and motherboards prices.

The basic goal is to provide you with the best deals, and follow price trends of the listed products. We have selected a leading team of on-line vendors, and will be tracking their progress on weekly basis. Please note that all vendors were selected according to their best price offered. Some vendors may ask that you place a phone-order to make sure that you receive our listed price; others simply ask that you mention where you found the price (in this case AnandTech). We have tried to eliminate vendors with low feedback rating, but we do encourage you to do some sort of a rating research before purchasing any product from this list.

If you encounter any problems with a vendor on our list, please email us, and we will take appropriate action. Remember that we will only list vendors with positive customer feedback. If you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to let me know.

Also be sure to check out AnandTech's Hot Deals Forum for even more great CPU, video card and other technology buys.

Disclamer

AnandTech does not endorse any vendor listed in the following price guide. AnandTech does not receive any advertising fees and/or sponsorship from the listed vendors. All views expressed by listed vendors do not reflect the opinions of AnandTech.

AnandTech, nor any of the vendors mentioned guarantee that the prices listed in this guide are accurate.

This week

The memory market has been a bit shaky for the past two weeks, and many feared that memory prices would skyrocket once again. Fortunately most prices didn't go up, and only a few models have dropped in price - at least for now.

Intel is currently dragging a well-known company by the name of Rambus behind them. Most readers are familiar with the fact that the new Intel Pentium 4 is currently only available with dual-channel PC800 RDRAM that is the brainchild of Rambus, Inc. At this point all Pentium 4 systems will be based on the RDRAM memory subsystem, which is bad news for the end user. RDRAM has significantly dropped in price within the past eight months - if you remember; there was a time when a stick of 128MB PC800 RDRAM cost up to $1200! Fortunately, it's no where near that expensive today, albeit still more expensive than SDRAM.

AMD is comfortably enjoying the fact that they are the only platform that supports DDR SDRAM for the time being. SDRAM is currently their key to success with value chipset configurations, while the newer DDR chipsets provide higher performance and the latest technology to the high-end market. DDR SDRAM should be widely available very soon, but we don't expect it to be very cheap, on par with CAS2 PC150 SDRAM prices at best. Eventually, it will reach virtual price parity with SDR SDRAM, but there's no telling how long that will be at the moment.