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.
We cleaned up some more motherboards and added a few more. Check out Granite Bay and SIS 655 boards for the week! Also, it seems as though GeForceFX boards are finally available for pre-order.
The first thing you may notice is that we added an additional
column on the left hand side of our guides. Since we often get a lot of emails
asking for more info about each product, the additional column should point
to an article that we wrote about the particular motherboard or video card.
Please report broken links.
Intel motherboards remained largely unchanged this week, but Granite
Bay (E7205) motherboards seem to be popping up with more frequency. Prices,
unfortunately seem unusually high, in the 200USD range for even the most basic
of GB solutions. Fortunately, we are going to start seeing SIS's brilliant answer
to Granite Bay within the next week or so. While checking out NewEgg, we saw
the first pre-order of the Gigabyte SINXP1934 which we reviewed several
weeks ago.
The SIS 655 boards gave even the best E7205 boards a run
for their money, so we highly recommend passing over the Granite Bay boards
and waiting until more SIS 655 boards become available. For the more value oriented consumer, we still recommend the 845PE
boards. These boards still pack a mighty punch, without sacrificing performance.
Our Intel board of choice for this week remains the ASUS P4PE. It turns out
that we still have quite a wait before Springdale/Centerwood boards hit the market, so
if you plan on buying an intermediate stepping stone, the 845PE is still the
board of choice.
This week's AMD motherboards proved more interesting than the Intel based boards. For the most part, KT333 based chipsets dropped
at least 10% in price, even if our price engine does not entirely reflect
that. (Our engine updates every week, but we only post motherboard guides
every 2 weeks.) KT400 based motherboards also show little or no change, when
in fact they have dropped approximately 10-15% as well since our last guide.
nForce2 boards have retained their price since debut for the
most part. Without any competition, these boards are really the only choice
for anyone considering an AMD based platform right now. Specifically, the
EPoX 8RDA+ dropped in price again to become our AMD motherboard pick of the
week. This board is priced aggressively with EPoX's own KT400 based chipset,
but as we know from several benchmarks and tests of the nForce2 chipset, the
additional few dollars spent on the 8RDA+ is money well spent. Unfortunately
ASUS's A7N8X Deluxe model has moved very little since introduction. The 30USD
difference in price between these two models seems unpromising unless you
plan on investing in a serial ATA drive any time soon.
However, if you have money to burn for serial ATA we recommend
rethinking your decision and buying a faster processor instead. The performance
increase does not seem to warrant the extremely high price tag just yet, so
money spent on a Barton processor will most likely result in a greater boost
in performance.
We also included a few budget AMD boards this week, since there
seems to be some extremely good deals if you plan on assembling that long
desired Linux box or second workstation. With AMD XP 2100+ Thoroughbred B
CPU's retailing for under 100USD, and DDR dropping to under 60 bucks for 512MB
of PC2700, it becomes almost trivial to construct a sub 400USD workstation.
We recently put together a small cluster of 3 ECS K7VMM+ based FreeBSD machines
here in the lab with the final cost of each at 360USD each. Even though RAM
and processors continue to drop like a rock, AMD systems are still excellent
buys for this week.
The ATI video card train proves again this week to be a wild
ride. We are not sure if resellers just can not make up their minds, or if
products fly off the shelves, but we can conclude that unusual practices are
abundant in this market. For example, last week we noticed that the Gigabyte
Maya II 9700 Pro was carried by virtually every merchant. This week, however,
most major merchants do not have a single unit in stock. Several in fact deleted
the item from their inventory.
Meanwhile, we are having troubles differentiating between Sapphire
and "Built by ATI" video cards as almost every merchant we list
tends to use the interchangeably. These cards are technically identical, the
only difference being the color of the PCB and the OEM fan. However, most
people enjoy getting what they pay for, so paying for a video card that proclaims
"Built by ATI" should result in the same red PCB card. We attempted
to screen our cards the best we could, although some resellers seem to make
it very difficult to find out which card you are actually buying.
Most 9700 Pro cards were priced in the 300USD range while the
FIC AT010 undercut the Sapphire equivalent by approximately 20USD. Although
not all 9700 Pro's are made the same, we can justify the the marginal differences
with a significant 20USD difference. However, the Sapphire cards are also
slowly coming down in price, and we can expect them to break the 300USD range
within the next few weeks. Obviously, when we start to see some R350 chipsets
we can expect the 9700/Pro cards to drop at least 25% in price.
Other notable tidbits include the lack of any third party 9700
Pro All-In-Wonder cards. We are starting to see some 9000 AIW cards which
we will start listing next week. However, the promised Sapphire BEAST 9700
Pro seems surprisingly absent from the "Powered by ATI" market.
Hopefully it makes an appearance soon since Sapphire cards seem to carry 30-40USD
difference under the ATI OEM cards.
We waited. We waited some more. Another 8 months went by and we were still
waiting. Well, we are still technically waiting. NewEgg and ENPC are now taking
pre-orders for GeForceFX 5800 cards. As rumor would hold true, it does appear
as if the 5800 Ultra has been canceled, but those who already pre-ordered a
card will still receive one.
More problems seem to have plagued the card as ridicule and speculation has
forced NVIDIA to recall the current 5800 cards from production in order to redesign
the fan and packaging on the card. Most sources speculate we will see the card
finally available for retail on March 31/April 1st. Hopefully, that is not some
kind of cruel April Fool's joke. GeForceFX's strange journey seems almost freakishly
akin to the rise and fall of the Voodoo4/5 series video cards.
Also absent are the Ti4600 cards from this week's guide. Unfortunately, it
seems like manufacturers are trying their best to dump inventory of these old
cards. The cards that were not relabled as Ti4800's or Ti4600-8X have simply
been dumped due to lack of demand. What further complicates matters is that NV31 appears to be the inevitable replacement for the Ti4600 and thus directly compete with RV350. NVIDIA also seems to be largely ignoring GeForceFX 5800 NV30 in favor of developing NV35 to directly compete with R350. Yes, NVIDIA's marketing confuses us too.
Furthermore, controversy has spun its web around the upcoming GeForceFX NV30 chip
as the "4x2" architecture issues continue to surface. For those of
you who are not familiar, apparently many sources are claiming that the NV30
chipset contains only 4 rendering pipelines as opposed to the 8 that NVIDIA
unveiled at COMDEX. The catch is that each pipeline contains 2 TMUs which should
result in the the promised 8 textures per clock, but only when multitexturing.
On an unrelated note longtime NVIDIA partner VisionTek
continues their anti-NVIDIA campaign while still lacking any production products.
Perhaps Hartford is relying on VisionTek's "good name" in order to
build a stronger base of operations before actually releasing cards to the public.
Maybe RV350 vs NV31 will be more interesting than extra delayed R300
and NV30 matchup. Hopefully we do not have to wait another 9 months to see any NVIDIA developments.
Meh.