Weekly Memory & Motherboard Price Guide: January 2001 1st Edition

Introduction

It's time once again for AnandTech's Memory and Motherboard price guide.

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 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 us know.

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

Disclaimer

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

As you might remember, our last memory price guide showed drops in quite a few types of memory modules but with the new millennium we have a mixed bag of price changes. PC133 SDRAM CAS2 and CAS3 for the most part have fallen in price with a few exceptions where some modules have remained steady in price. With prices still coming down, you can still purchase great performance memory for a great price. Except for the 256MB module, PC800 RDRAM is still falling in price making it more affordable for the end user.

In our last memory price guide, our pricing for DDR SDRAM reflected those of Crucial modules, which at the time were only available to system builders for development, not the regular consumer. Just in time for this weeks guide, Crucial has announced that these DDR modules will in fact be available for order directly from them by anyone, albeit at higher prices than they were offerring the samples to developers last week. They currently only have PC1600 modules available to the general public, but we expect this to change fairly soon. The PC2100 modules you see in this guide are from other manufacturers that lack the infrastructure to sell directly to the consumer and are thus priced quite a bit higher. Pricing from Crucial, however, is not at all unreasonable and could eventually approach that of high quality PC133 as production ramps up further.

Motherboards using AMD's 760 chipset, along with its DDR memory support, are still hard to find. Even if you can get your hands on one, you can expect to pay a sizeable premium just to get it this early. Like the AMD 760, KT133A, and ALi MAGIK1 based motherboards are also still hard to find in the general marketplace. However once the KT133A boards become more available you can expect to see that the combination of SDRAM and the KT133A pack a powerful punch compared to the DDR SDRAM solutions. In addition, as the prices of SDRAM continue to fall KT133A systems will most likely be better priced than the combination of DDR SDRAM and a DDR motherboard.

For this week more i815E motherboards have fallen slightly more in price than KT133 boards which makes both types of motherboards great solutions for buyers looking to build a solid PC system.