Well, I got from CES 2006 last week, and got a couple of quick articles up that look at the latest in PC technology.  Turns out you can actually buy some of this stuff too!

The AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor is for sale at four different stores and ranges in price from $1138.99 to $1339.  That is definitely higher than the 200 MHz slower Athlon X2 4800+ that can be found for as low as $787 in a few places.  The fact that I said “as low as” in that sentance should tell you a bit about the FX-60 processors price-to-value ratio!

Something else we were really glad to see at CES was an upgrade to wildly popular Western Digital Raptor hard drive.  The original 36 GB version was quickly replaced (or up-staged by) the 74 GB version of the drive, but it took quite a long time for us to get the 150 GB Raptor X out of their hands.  It can be found for just under $300 at most places.  One note is that this version for sale is NOT the windowed, enthusiast-based drive that shows you the action of the spinning platters and moving head.  That one should be about $50 more though, so you might be happy with these if you don’t have a window on your case. 

There is one product missing from stores this week: NVIDIA’s 7800 GTX 512 cards.  While they were for sale on launch day and a few were spotted right before CES, currently no one has these in stock.  We have two listed on the Pricegrabber engine — one from XFX at Monarch Computer and one from MSI at PC Connection — but neither have stock.  Where is the once crowing-NVIDIA’s stock on these parts?  I guess that little bit about delivering parts as promised is already forgotten.  Even more suprisingly, the ATI X1800 XT can be found just about everywhere for under $500 in many cases.  Hell, even the CrossFire edition is in stock!  The tables seem to have turned….