How We Track Pricing: Our Methodology
The Hardware Core publishes weekly pricing data in our Market Tracker. Here's exactly how that data is collected, so you can verify it yourself rather than take our word for it.
What We Track
We track seven fixed products every week, using the same specific model every time, not whatever happens to be cheapest that week:
Memory: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 (Model F5-6000J3038F16GX2-TZ5NR)
GPUs: RTX 5070 (MSI Ventus 3X OC), RTX 5060 Ti 16GB (MSI Shadow 2X OC Plus), RX 9060 XT 16GB (PowerColor Reaper), RTX 5090 (specific model to be locked once back in stock)
Storage: WD Black SN850X 2TB (Gen 4, Model WDS200T2X0E), Crucial T705 2TB (Gen 5, specific model to be locked once back in stock)
How We Calculate the Price
Every Sunday, we manually check Newegg.com for each of these exact products, "Sold by Newegg" listings only, brand new, in stock. We record the price we find. No averaging across retailers, no automated scraping, no marketplace or refurbished listings. A real person checks a real product page every week.
You can check our work. Search the exact model number on Newegg any Sunday or Monday and you'll see the same listing we're reporting.
What We Don't Do
We don't average prices across retailers. We don't include third-party marketplace sellers, open-box, or refurbished listings. We don't substitute a different product just because it's cheaper that week.
When a Product Is Out of Stock
If a tracked product shows zero "Sold by Newegg" stock on our check, we report it as Out of Stock, not a workaround price, not a skipped entry. Unavailability is real market data, and we'd rather show you an honest gap than a number we made up.
When We Change a Tracked Product
If a specific model becomes permanently unavailable, we replace it with a comparable in-stock product and disclose the change here, with the date it happened. Our full historical data, including any substitutions, is available in our downloadable dataset below.
Our Full Dataset
Every week's numbers, going back to our first tracked entry, are available as a live spreadsheet you can download or review directly: [Download our full pricing dataset]
Where Our Trend Commentary Comes From
When we explain why prices are moving, we sometimes reference TrendForce's industry-wide DRAM and NAND contract pricing data. This is different from our tracked retail prices; it's context for understanding the broader supply chain, not a number we blend into our own tracker. We always label it separately when we use it.
Why We Do It This Way
Most hardware pricing content pulls a number from wherever ranks first in a search that week. We think that's a weak standard. Fixed products, manually verified from a specific in-stock listing, checked the same way every week, mean our data is boring to produce and easy to trust, which is exactly the tradeoff we want.
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