Price parity
As more manufacturing resources are devoted to DDR3 and away from DDR2, the law of supply and demand ensures the prices will converge. But how much longer does that mean will we have to wait until the crucial moment of price parity arrives?
"The mainstream switched from DDR1 when DDR2 became cheaper," confirmed Madaci. "It will still take some time for DDR3 to become mainstream - six months or so."
While DDR2 might be enjoying a generally welcome increase in price after a long period of decline, it looks like the prices of individual types of DDR2 are also converging. "More people are buying DDR2-800 than DDR2-667 because the price is roughly the same," said Madaci. "It's headed that way with DDR2-1066 too; people are trying to push DDR2-1066 as the mainstream memory."
To find out what this might mean for the motherboard market we turned to Biostar product manager Glen Rhodes and asked him how being the exclusive Biostar distie has gone. "It's been growing and growing," said Rhodes. "We'd never really done much in the high end motherboard market before."
"This is primarily down to it being something new (in terms of distribution) and two of the boards holding world overclocking records. The overclocking software is considered some of the best around too and the competitive pricing doesn't do any harm."
"Now our big etail customers are mostly going for high-end boards like the T Power I45 and the T Power X58. We also sell a lot into eBay and Amazon traders."