Price trends

[Mogh]

I was going to buy some new systems, but has anyone else notice the prices for everything seem to be trending upward these last few months. Even stuff that has been out for a long time seems to be going up instead of down. Makes me wish I had made my purchases a few months ago rather than wait.

For Intel I assume the reason is with Northwoods being phased out is driving up demand and therefore price. But I see other things like mobos are either going up and not dropping. The medium to high end video cards are out of stock at many online outlets and prices seem not be dropping or trending up there to.

Anyone remember if the same thing happened last fall? Do we normally see a drop off in prices in December or January?

 

[DaveSimmons]

For P4 C chips it's like you say, they are being phased out so the lousy E chips are cheaper. Not that you should be buying intel this year anyway given A64 is faster and cheaper.

For video cards, nvidia and ATI just haven't been able to make enough GPUs to meet demand for people upgrading for Doom3 and Half-Life 2. Supply not meeting demand means high prices.

This year it just happens that "must have" games came out at a time when nvidia and ATI are struggling with production. Last year demand was lower so there was no price spike.