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On German price comparison services AMDs whole AM2 CPU lineup as well as a few mainboards for the new socket are listed. One board is said to be in stock

As the launch of AMDs AM2 platform is drawing nearer, merchants are starting to list corresponding products for sale via online shops. In Germany, the UK and Austria various e-tailers are already listing the whole AM2 CPU lineup for prices that align around the price points, which emerged from unofficial roadmaps earlier. Some have also listed various MSI mainboards based on variations of the nForce 500 chipset for socket AM2. One board is even listed as "in stock" and available for shipping within 1-2 days.

On the price comparison service www.geizhals.at, the whole lineup of AM2 processors was listed a little more than a week ago. I'd like to note, that they got some CPU specs wrong. For example they claim that several Athlon 64 X2 processors are based on Brisbane core, whih is wrong of course, since Brisbane is a 65nm chip slated for early 2007.

Last week five mainboards from MSI based on variations of the nForce 500 chipset showed up in the AM2 mainboards section. At about the same time, some of these boards were announced by MSI Netherlands. It includes the low-end MSI K9N Neo-F with nForce 550 chipset, midrange nForce 570 boards K9N Ultra and K9N Platinum, as well as upper end K9N SLI and K9N SLI Platinum based on the nForce 570 SLI chipset. The K9N Diamond will be a promising high-end platform based on the allegedly highly overclockable nForce 590 chipset. Interestingly a lot of shops claim to have the K9N SLI Platinum already in stock (I counted 10+). At a price point of about 120 euros this seems to be a very affordable and still capable offering. Geizhals.at also added an Abit KN9 SLI mainboard to their database, but at press time no merchant offered this mainboard so you won't see it in the list.

As an hardware editor over at german website K-Hardware I'm very please about such preliminary information. Similiar "information leak" happened with Intels price drops of several Pentium D processors, which were predicted earlier. A lot of merchants offered the CPUs for the new prices more than a week of the official change and also listed Pentium D 960 chip more than a week before it's silent introduction.