Prices of Computer Components Continue to Drop

Joe St Sauver
joe@oregon.uoregon.edu

If you don't routinely check the price of computer components, you may be amazed at how cheap mainstream computing parts have become.

For example, if you look at the prices quoted on http://www.pricewatch.com, you'll see Intel PIII 1GHz FCPGA CPUs for approximately $175 plus S&H, or for the same price you can get an AMD Athlon TBird 1.4GHz.

Hard drives have gotten cheaper, too. Eighty gig EIDE hard drives are down to under $200, and 20 gig EIDE drives are only $60. Or consider memory: 512MB of Memory (PC133 SDRAM) is down to ~$50-$60 plus S&H, and 256MB of Memory (PC133 SDRAM) is only about $20-$25 plus S&H.

Of course, some components haven't come down in price as quickly. For example, you will recall that we warned you in an earlier edition of Computing News against buying RDRAM-based systems. If you have to buy RDRAM instead of SDRAM, you'd be dismayed to find that 512MB of RDRAM starts at just under $400 (plus S&H), and that even 256MB of RDRAM still runs right around $135 (plus S&H).

On the other hand, it is now routine to find excellent quality workhorse 19" monitors in the $250 price range from Internet retailers such as www.buy.com, and top-of-the-line video cards have become comparably inexpensive.

Bottom line, when you configure or upgrade a system, be careful not to end up building a system that is underpowered, or which will have a an unnecessarily short life span.

You can afford a more powerful system than you may have thought!