The market is rising overall. I support I/T at a semiconductor plant here....they make the raw semiconductor material used in the chips. Their forecast shows a banner year in production with steadily rising prices towards the end of the year with potentially prices at or near what they were before the massive slide of a couple years ago.
you just have to find the right place, eBay IS GOD. i found two sticks of 512Mb PC3200 for £50 each, also if using ebay try www.snip.pl its great, it puts your max bid in 5 seconds before the auction closes and you can group things and bid on 10 of the same things but if you win 1 (or whatever number) then it cancels the rest of your bids
go to pricewatch.com They offer some great deals. I just got my Athlon XP2600 cpu and mobo for $100.14 I also got 2 sticks of pc 2700 ddr for $62 ($28.99 each) Right now the prices are down but Rick is right, the prices keep going up.
Little Asian hands make the cheapest tech products, from what I hear.
I have some colleagues buying things like DVD burners for as little as $15-20 each, external drive enclosures for less than $5 and what are usually expensive cables for less than a $1 for two of them. Even authentic OS software for just dollars each, like the Mac OS X.2 and X.3 upgrades.