pricewatch.com full of lies; no one surprised

Post by **Jonathan** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 2:16 am

So if you check out dem memory prices at pricewatch.com, you'd shit your pants initially. Seems like you can get a stick of PC4000 for the same as a stick PC3200 costs, more or less. Pair that up with a nice Taiwanese motherboard with 1MHz FSB overclock increments and go to town, eh?

Unfortunately, all that "cheap" memory is generic or "house brand", which is essentially a code word for "doesn't work." In addition, a quick spot check reveals that the reseller ratings for some of these "cheap" memory places are abysmal. In many cases, they veer off into the actually fraudulent.

The net effect of all this is to render pricewatch.com useless. So what are people using instead nowadays? Post some links here. I recently got a link to pricegrabber.com, which seems OK. They don't have as comprehensive a product list as I would like (I'm looking for a deal on some PC3500-4000, and they only have one or two products in those categories), but what they have is all name-brand products on reputable websites.

VLSmooth · Post by **VLSmooth** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 3:18 am

Ars Shopping Engine

Admittedly, I haven't used it myself, but the parent site, Ars Technica, is one I browse often.

Post by **Jonathan** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 4:39 pm

Actually, that's pretty nice. I've tried the anandtech.com one, and it's not as good.

Ars isn't so good for reviews or guides, but for introductions Ars can't be beat. To paraphrase something I read in reference to Ars: "Hannibal is, like, an engineer or something."

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 6:08 pm

after buying from ubid.com i decided to only buy from known vendors and big places (like Dell!) even if they are more expensive (and better... like Dell!!!)

Post by **Jonathan** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 6:27 pm

Somebody owns some Dell stock.

But seriously, I do tend to use Newegg pretty much exclusively because I trust them. I only bought my PS from Directron because they are practically the only people to sell the single fan True 380 standalone. And look where that got me.

I figured maybe I might find a better deal on speciality RAM, though, so I'm looking. As always, though, Newegg has pretty good prices. I'll probably wind up ordering everything from them, but it's good to know I have a good price.

Post by **Jonathan** » Tue Jan 20, 2004 11:35 pm

Sweet monkey Jebus. OCZ has a lot of different product lines. For RAM. For RAM! At the same speed! I could pay like $110, $130, or like $174 for some 3700, depending on which product series I go with.

Post by **Jonathan** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 12:23 am

My bank account says, "Don't buy 2 GB of RAM."
My perf instincts say, "Don't buy 512 MB of RAM."

Therefore, holding capacity constant at (512x2) 1 GB of RAM, we observe the following.

Holding latency constant, you pay more for higher speed memory.
Holding speed constant, you pay more for lower latency memory.
Holding price constant, you are forced to make a tradeoff between latency and speed.

Assuming the size of my bank account is constant, price must be held constant. So I am faced with a decision: on the one hand, we all know lower latency equals teh win. On the other hand, I want to get a good overclock out of this Northwood I have. The guy who gave it to me has his running at 3.6 (240x15) which translates to a bus speed of 480, which seems possible. PC4000 is 500 MHz and PC3700 is 466 MHz. So I guess I should figure out my budget and buy the lowest latency PC3700 I can find at that price. Unless there's some PC4000 that is comparable. Uh.

VLSmooth · Post by **VLSmooth** » Wed Jan 21, 2004 12:59 am

Um, not much I can say besides yes?

I haven't overclocked speed recently myself, but I've read most brand name RAM does so easily, hence I pay for latency. Helps that AMD is more affected by latency than Intel as well ^_^;