At Tom's Hardware, somebody wanted to check what any one of us, who has lived in more than one country, already suspected: hardware prices are not one and the same.

To obtain good data, they compared prices before taxes (no VAT, thank you) and verified that products with suspiciously low prices were in stock. With the intention of avoiding a great exchange impact, prices are given both in USD and Euros. The components chosen for the comparison were: an Intel Core 2 Duo E6850, a Zalman CNPS9700 cooler, an Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, a Crucial Ballistix DDR3 kit, a Western Digital WD5000AAKS HDD, a Gigabyte GeForce GV-NX88S320H-B-RH graphics card, a Coolermaster RS850 EMBA power supply and a San Disk Extreme III 2 GB SD Card.

Conclusions, when it comes to countries, are not to be taken without surprise, even if they were expected. To explain. France is expensive (expected), but it is more so if compared to their neighbours the germans (who are cheap). The best prices are to be found in the United States (go figure). If we talk about products, a usual component (like a graphics card) will not vary more than a 10 to 30%. Differences are much bigger when you either want something special (an aftermarket heatsink or a good power supply) or basic consumer electronics accessories (for example, a memory card).

Link: Tom's Hardware.

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