Price Guide, November 2005: Motherboards

Introduction

Well, it's that time again for another one of our motherboard price guides. Like many of our other guides, we would like to start off with pointing out a few things about our RTPE. Our RTPE is the only engine to use our own bots to fish price data directly from the vendor. It uses a search technology called Irk that crawls through thousands of links per hour to assure the best prices for our consumers. We constantly track all of the highly recommended and rated merchants and since we do not collect revenue from the merchants for link traffic, we are free to use merchants that have competitive pricing rather than deep advertising pockets . Go ahead and give our RTPE a try next time that you're in the market for computer hardware; we're sure that you'll find it especially useful.

Socket 939 motherboards are slowly declining in price; catching up to the prices of their Socket 754 counterparts, making the Socket 939 front the most logical solution. Our recommendations are usually not really specific to any brand, but this week, we've noticed the best deals from Gigabyte and MSI. Most prices are roughly the same since our last price guide, while we observed the most changes in the nForce4 SLI - Socket 939 platform.

Athlon 64 - Socket 939

Out of all the SLI boards that are showing up in our RTPE, the one with the most significant price decrease is the Abit AN8 SLI [RTPE: AN8 SLI] with a change of $3.45. On the other hand, recently the Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI [RTPE: GA-K8NU-SLI] has increased about $21. Everything has either stayed at the same price point since our last price guide or has had a small fluctuation of a few cents to a couple of dollars. The price leader this week is the Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLI [RTPE: GA-K8N-SLI] going for $91 shipped.



The Asus nForce4 Ultra A8N-E [RTPE: A8N-E] has gone down about $8 over the past week; bringing it down to about $105. While the Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra [RTPE: GA-K8N Ultra] has been steadily increasing in price over the past few weeks, currently up nearly $18, which can be seen in the graph below.

Gigabyte nForce4 Ultra (939) GA-K8N Ultra-9

We would like to point out the Chaintech VNF4 Ultra VE [RTPE: VNF4 Ultra VE], which is an excellent deal for a mere $77 shipped. Not the cheapest price that we've seen, but definitely one of the lowest. Another good deal is on the DFI Infinity [RTPE: NF4 Infinity] going for about $96 shipped.





Not as popular as the nForce 4 chipsets, VIA is still hanging in there with a few boards. Just as the last price guide, currently, the best priced board is the Gigabyte GA-K8VT890-9 [RTPE: GA-K8T890-9] on sale for $76 plus shipping.



For those who have invested in a nice AGP card and also want the ability to upgrade to a PCI-E card later on, the Asrock ULi M1695 [RTPE: 939Dual-SATA2] would be a great option. At the moment, it is going for $72 shipped. The 939Dual-SATA2 has both a PCI-E slot and an 8x AGP slot, which will allow you to upgrade to a PCI-E card without having to dish out extra cash for a new board.



Lastly in the Socket 939 platform, we have the boards with the nForce 3 chipset. We wouldn't recommend one of these boards again unless you already have invested in a nice AGP card because these motherboards only have AGP slots. Currently, of these boards, the MSI K8N Neo2-F is the only one that has had any price changes. It decreased a mere one dollar and is still the cheapest of the bunch at $74 shipped.