Price Guides March 2004: CPU and Motherboards
by Kristopher Kubicki on March 15, 2004 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Welcome to another edition of the price guides. With new CPU and motherboard announcements, we took some time to write our thoughts and recommendations for this week. As always, feel free to check out our RealTime Price Guide for up to the minute deltas and prices.
AMD CPUs
There has been a lot of exciting news for AMD CPUs lately; hopefully everyone got a chance to check out or AMD CPU Roadmaps and Updates. Keep in mind that the upcoming A64 launch is later this month and next, so for those of you looking for an enthusiast purchase may wish to hold off a new purchase for a couple weeks. Socket 939 is on its way, but still a couple months off (we may see samples a lot earlier than that though!).
Overclocked Athlon XP-M chips have become all the rage recently; the already low voltage and no multiplier lock allow die hard overclockers to pull 2.5GHz (and much more) out of a processor that normally runs at 1.8GHz. The Mobile Bartons force you to pay an extra $20 premium, but if overclocking is your thing, you are essentially assured a good processor to do it with. We recently added a complete lineup of mobile Athlons to our price engine.
If you need a stable processor with no real intention of overclocking, the normal desktop Athlon 2500+ is still our CPU of choice. You just can't go wrong for the price. Unfortunately, all week there has been very little activity on Athlon 64 processors, so do not expect many new price breaks there.
Interestingly enough, we already have seen Athlon FX-53 preorders start to show up. The official release is not scheduled for a week yet, but what interests us the most is the price point.
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b4417 - Wednesday, March 24, 2004 - link
The Price Guide shows the 3.4 GHz Intel Prescott CPU available at Essential Computers. Going to Essential's website, it shows the processor "In Stock", and "Available to ship in 24-48 hours." I tried to order one, only to be greeted with a "Cookies Must Be Enabled" message. I HAD cookies enabled, and even double-checked my IE settings to be sure. So I called them, and was told that they don't have the 3.4 Prescott in stock and have no ETA, regardless of what the website shows.This appears to be a ploy to get their name in the listing without having the item available as stated. I find that pretty offensive, and would like to see their listing removed from the guide.
Thanks,
Bill
justly - Tuesday, March 16, 2004 - link
Why aren’t any SiS based motherboards listed for either Intel or AMD platforms. I mean if you can list a board from XFX (who the heck are they?) that only supports FSB speeds up to 333MHz (socket A) and a board from ECS (a company that is not popular with the enthusiast crowd) why not include a SiS motherboard that can at least run a 400MHz FSB (socket A) from a well known company like Gigabyte, or the Asus P4S800D-E Deluxe (SiS 655TX chipset) that Anandtechs own Wesley Fink commented highly about in a review.KristopherKubicki - Monday, March 15, 2004 - link
ehanneken - Yes, youre correct. I meant more along the lines of wait till the leaked samples hit reviews :-pKristopher
ehanneken - Monday, March 15, 2004 - link
Sorry, I didn't realize that this forum doesn't interpret HTML.ehanneken - Monday, March 15, 2004 - link
<blockquote></i>Keep in mind that the upcoming Socket 939 launch is later this month, so for those of you looking for an enthusiast purchase may wish to hold off a new purchase for a couple weeks.</i></blockquote>According to your <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1985&q... update</a> on AMD's Athlon 64 roadmap, the first Socket 939 processors won't be released until May. Has something changed?
Pumpkinierre - Monday, March 15, 2004 - link
No 3.4 Prescott yet? Coupla of extra layers on the N'wood core Xeons. Who's betting on a 3.6 or 3.8 Northwood release?CrystalBay - Sunday, March 14, 2004 - link
Thanks, for puting out some news on the weekend..