Price Guides, May 2005: Processors

As always, we like to start off our price guides with a little plug for our Real Time Price Engine, quite possibly the fastest growing price engine on the internet. We thought we would mention that we just added our 5,000 th product a few days ago, and we are happy to boast that site traffic for the RTPE had quadrupled since December. Thanks for choosing the RTPE and the QuickSearch RSS!

Merchant news this week has been relatively bland since last week. Newegg’s spinoff, ChiefValue, continues to dominate the price landscape. Last week, CV held the lowest prices on 20% of our listed products, but Monarch and ZipZoomFly aren’t just sitting around. Pricing across the board are much lower than usual.

There have been several new products since our last CPU guide. AMD unleashed its dual core madness several weeks ago, and we brought coverage on the Opterons and Athlon 64 X2s, and merchants are just starting to ship some of those processors now (which we, of course, have added to our price engine). Intel has quietly released some new low end SKUs, and of course, their dual core solution is also geared up for sometime before June (check out Part I and Part II of our Intel dual core analysis here). With all these new SKUs from AMD and Intel, it can get fairly difficult to pick out a processor. Last week, we wrote a small little update on some of the core names and details to help combat that!

In other price engine related news, we started listing DDR memory kits instead of single stick products. The new kits are denoted as “2x512MB”, “2x256”, etc. Of course, if you see a product that we don’t have yet, feel free to email us and let us know!