Weekly Memory & Motherboard Price Guide: March 2001 2nd Edition

March madness may be sweeping the country but it's having little effect with Socket-370/Slot-1/Socket-423 motherboards. Prices with i815E and i815EP boards have been quiet since our last guide except for some modest drops. We still recommend both the ASUS CUSL2 and CUSL2-C because they both share stability, a solid design, and great overclocking features. VIA Apollo Pro 133A-based boards have not changed in price again illustrating the general trend towards stabilization in pricing. Though we've added some more dual Socket-370 motherboards to the list the Microstar 694D Pro receives our recommendation not only because of its price but also it sports a good list of features and is the most stable dual Socket-370 to enter our labs to date.

Though prices with Socket-370 and Slot-1 boards are relatively quiet, Socket-423 boards continue to fall in price with the MSI MS-850-Pro and ASUS P4T being the movers and shakers of the bunch with drops of $29 and $14 this week.

This week we introduce VIA Pro266-based motherboards which gives DDR power to Socket-370 CPUs making the DDR market even more competitive since Socket A DDR solutions have been in the marketplace for some time now. The VIA Pro266 chipset, like the AMD 760 or ALi MAGiK 1 chipset, is the first chipset to provide DDR SDRAM support for the Pentium III allowing for more memory bandwidth and a larger memory capacity. We recently reviewed the Gigabyte GA-6RX and were generally pleased with the board since it provided onboard Creative audio and a Promise IDE RAID controller though we wouldn't recommend it due to its price tag and other limitations.

Make sure you check out our latest i815 Socket-370 Motherboard reviews for more information.