Price drop on the chaintech VNF4/Ultra?

[aznman]

Do u think there will be a price drop in the board anytime soon?(one or two months) Im still waiting for the x800 xl and i am very interested in this board. Just wondering if its price will drop anytime soon. Thanks in advance!

 

[ts3433]

It'll probably drop a little as we see more NF4 boards get released--though it's already fairly low for S939 boards, at $120.

 

[amheck]

I'm pretty sure it will. That's just the way computer parts go. There's no need to buy it now if you're waiting on the x800xl anyway, so don't sweat it. Heck, the x800xl might not be out for 2-3 months, so you might as well wait. I doubt the Chaintech board would be more expensive in 2-3 months - put it that way.

 

[gobucks]

I don't see prices going down too much. After all, the MSRP for the non-ultra is $100, and the cheapest one available is the Gigabyte, for $130. On the other hand, the Chaintech is $120, $30 under MSRP. I mean, look at the NF3 GB/Ultras - most of them are still more expensive than the chaintech board, and they use older technology, so i don't see much room for chaintech to budge on them. Maybe they'll drop $10, but that's hardly much of a difference in a $1000 computer, now is it! What I do expect, though, is for the board to put some pressure on other manufacturers to cut prices in order to compete, which is good news for people who want the Gigabyte Ultra board but don't want to pay SLI prices for it ($189 for an ultra board is rediculous!!!).

On another note, I definitely think that the Chaintech VNF4/Ultra is a pretty good board, being an owner of one myself. The overclocking potential is good, although my memory constrains that a bit. The performance is quite good, and all the features work well. As a former owner of an A8N-SLI, I can honestly say that there aren't any features I miss that aren't present in the Chaintech board. There are only a few problems I've seen. 1) The shipping BIOS blows, make sure you update to the newest beta or you'll likely have memory stability problems (it rejected PQI turbo DDR500 and Corsair VS modules with the old BIOS). The newest beta is dated 1-26-2005. 2) The new betas add 1T/2T manual command rate setting, but switching doesn't seem to make a difference, it still shows up as 2T, so i think it's gonna require another update before it works properly. Still, the auto timing detection seemed to work with the oldest bios, so it seems to be a firmware rather than a hardware problem, so i'm sure they'll fix it. 3) I wish there were more divider options for memory speeds. So far, they only have 200MHz, 166MHz, 133MHz, 100MHz. I would like to have 150MHz, which would let me hit 2.4-2.5GHz without pushing my memory too far, but also without lowering the multiplier and upping the FSB to 300+MHz. Still, I think all the problems are BIOS related, and they are making great strides with the updates, so i'm confident that it will be working perfectly soon.

 

[bradley]

I definitely think it will drop to $119 at NewEgg, which was the original price when the motherboard first appeared for sale. However, I highly doubt the price will drop much further than $119 for at least 4-6months. And with demand so high for Nforce4 motherboards, and limited supplies, I still expect prices to keep stable, if not fluctuate upward, for at least a few weeks.