Online History Of Computer Component Prices?

jtdubs asks: "I was pricing out computer components today and stumbled across an idea for a Web site. It would be nice to be able to query a database by product type (CPU, RAM) or brand (INTEL, AMD, Corsair) and be able to get graphs of each of their products and a graph of their respective prices over time. It could be helpful for determining when price drops will occur or for analyzing how new product releases affect pricing and would just be generally neat. Does anything like this exist already?"

Comments

Slight problem

[bconway]

The idea is great, but the problem is that technology advances at too great of a speed. Most charts would start at a high point and then slowly level off at a lower price, before being replaced by newer hardware of a different type/speed. Think about it, how many components in your current system are the same type (i.e. memory goes from EDO -> PC100, etc) that were in your system 3 years ago? The same technologies just aren't in use for long enough for this to be too exciting of a pattern to chart. Again, I think it's a great idea, but you would probably see similar graphs for most items over the course of about 6 months, before they would drop off in favor of newer technologies (i.e. newer graphics chipsets, in the case of video cards).

Who cares?

[Chacham]

The switch in price is useless. There is so much that needs to be thought about.

For example:

• In December components go up in price.
• After December components go down in price.
• There are special products such as hard drives of odd sizes, look at pricewatch.com for many anomalies.
• Catastrophies such as fires or floods wipe out storehouses in other parts of the world that bring prices up.
• Economic difficulties haves cheap parts from countries flood the market beinging prices down.
• Standards can make or brerak a product.

Price can't tell you how good something is, or even garantee its future, unless you look in the long run over many similar products. Such as memory, but keep watching as the standard moves, EDO got cheaper until SDRAM took over, then PC100, etc... Overall Memory was over $40 a meg just a few years ago, and is now closer to a half-dollar.

There are certain things that can be pointed out, overall after December prices fall, but do you really need a graph to show that?

If you're looking for day to day prices, so many stores vary, it's hard to show a graph of that. You just have to follow it yourself.