Well, I decided to take a tour of the usual places to see what was out there. The prices, when they exist, are all sky high for the NF4 boards. Gouging is right! Perhaps when the boards actually exist, their prices will come down.
I didn't see a single NF4 board for sale at NewEgg.
At Monarch the only NF4 board I see listed is the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe. It's going for $315 (USD), and it's available as part of a "system build only," whatever that is. I don't see that Monarch is claiming to have the item in stock, nor do I see an estimated date of availability. Ouch! Gouging is right!
The lowest prices I found were at ZipZoomFly. They have two NF4 boards, both by MSI (Neo4 Platinum). Both are out of stock. The non-SLI board is fetching $189 and its estimated arrival is 12/21. The SLI board is going for $209 and is expected to appear on 12/28. Here are links:
non-SLI MSI board at ZZF
SLI MSI board at ZZF
A search in PriceWatch.com led me to ComputerHQ, who are offering 7 different NF4 boards by a variety of manufacturers (Abit, Asus, DFI, Gigabyte, and MSI). None of the boards is in stock; all are in pre-order status. The cheapest one is going for $239.
PriceWatch also found several other vendors offering NF4 boards. I didn't bother to track down all the links, but I didn't see any that were obviously in stock, and the prices for all of them were close to or over $300.
Is the ZZF price currently the best one out there, or does someone see a better one?
Cheers,
Jim
