Hardware Shopping - NF4 and low exch. rate!

Continuing the recurring theme of shopping for PC hardware (with other people's money, of course), we take the availability of nVidia's newest chipset (actually, it's a single-chip solution for mainboard logic, but anyway) and the drop in USD to ISL exchange rate into account to produce the following budget-oriented (but fully-featured!) setup:

Hardware	Recommended Component	US Price	ISL exchange rate	US price in ISL	IL price inc. 17% VAT	ripoff rate
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 512K 1.8GHz 90nm for 939	$142	4.33	615	860	39.8%
Motherboard	MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (s939, nForce4 Ultra)	$140		606	860	41.9%
Memory	Brand 512MB PC-3200 CL3 x2	$100		433	640	47.8%
Video Card	Pine XFX 6600GT PCIe 128MB GDDR3	$172		745	1060	42.8%
Hard Drive	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB SATA w/ NCQ	$100		433	600	38.5%
sum:		$654		2,832	4,020	41.9%

Again, it's not a full computer, it's not necessarily the best offer in any way, the prices are from an unspecified vendor (including shipping but not assembling) and I take no responsibility for anything you do with this information I do not even guarantee is true.

1. The entry-level CPU was chosen because the 5%-10% advantage offered by the next step up isn't worth the money.
2. A non-SLI motherboard was chosen because buying a second video card is not a real option (notice it's the priciest item!).
3. CAS-3 memory was chosen because of the price premium for CAS-2.5 (not to mention CAS-2!), and hearsay stating it often works in CAS-2.5 timings just as well.
4. The 6600GT is the current sweet-spot (overly drawn discussion of reasons why isn't worth typing up). Because the motherboard is of the newer PCI-Express varienty (instead of the dying-out AGP), we take the PCIe version.
5. The 7200.7 NCQ has the best performance and warranty conditions (3 years full + 2 years limited warranty). The newer 7200.8 behemoth is slower, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 and 10 have a really crappy warranty by the Israeli importer and the Western Digital is outperformed (hasn't happened in years!). Just take care to get an NCQ part - the same model exists without NCQ, which is a vital feature for heavy multitasking performance, as recently shown by Anand Lal Shimpi.

Of the 42% difference between US and IL prices, 17% goes to the government. The other 25% is for shipping and someone's kids' college.