Weekly Memory Prices - Week of Jan 13, 2002 - Page 2

Weekly Memory Prices

SDRAM

I'm afraid I have to be the bearer of evil tidings. While we have been seeing some price increases on SDRAM memory over the past few weeks, I had to close this week's guide and reopen last week's again just to make sure I wasn't seeing things! For the most part SDRAM prices are on the rise... and in a major way. We didn't mark a single price drop and only two of the modules we list in SDRAM prices remained unchanged. Price increases start at $1 (PC133 ECC 128mb and PC133 CAS3 256mb) and go up to $38. That's right... PC133 CAS3 512mb went up $38 to $111.00 this week! Other SDRAM modules which went up in price by $20.00 or more this week include: PC100 CAS2 ECC 256mb, PC133 CAS2 512mb, and PC100 CAS3 256mb. All in all, this week's SDRAM prices won't be a welcome sight for anyone looking to upgrade his/her memory.

DDR SDRAM

DDR SDRAM prices, thankfully, remain largely unchanged in price. The only price difference we see, this week, is on the PC2100 256mb DIMMs, which rose $4 to $87.00. We should also note that this was one of the few DIMMs to change last week as well (where it bounced up by $11 then). And worse, there is still not a single price drop to be seen in the entire DDR SDRAM memory.

RDRAM

Finally, some price drops! The only drops in price we see in this week's guide is on RDRAM; but of course, that's probably because it started out so overpriced. Anyway, this week we see a nice little $26 price drop on PC800 ECC 512mb which now sits at $249.00. PC800 512mb also went down by $19 to match the price at $249.00. All other PC800 RIMMs rose 41 to $4 in price while the other PC800 ECC RIMMs remained unchanged this week.

Overall

Overall memory prices, especially SDRAM, is on the rise. While the price increases last week were rather disheartening to see, I don't think words can describe how consumers are going to feel this week when they head online to find some price quotes before making that memory upgrade. While we had a bit of a warning that memory price increases were going to happen, I don't think many of us were expecting such large price jumps to happen quite so quickly.

Do yourselves a favor and check prices again before deciding whether or not to buy, as prices have been changing (usually increasing) so quickly that most of this guide is unlikely to remain accurate for a day, let alone a week. We can all hope for some better prices on memory for consumers next week... but unfortunately, I wouldn't count on it!

Vangie"Aurora" Beal
News & Interviews Editor