Now that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and any other sneaky sales that try to ride on the coattails of these sales have passed (I’m looking at you Fry’s, your “One-Day Holiday Sale,” and you Dell, your “three-days-too-long Cyber Monday sale”) and we have a little bit of a breather before the next batch of “holiday sales” comes around the corner, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at what actually is a good deal and what’s a mediocre deal dressed up in various illusory percentages and “savings.”

One tip when shopping for electronics is to look for the product’s previous generation. If you’re willing to sacrifice a new name and sticker on your product (which is sometimes about as significant as the difference is), you can get a lot in savings. For example, with computer discrete graphics cards, the Radeon 4xxx series is being phased out in favor of the 5xxx series, something which is only going to accelerate when nVidia comes out with their new 3xx series. This means that stores are dropping prices to clear their old stock (to a certain point, once the supplies of a certain item get too low and the corresponding demand gets too high, prices may go up again). On online retailers such as Newegg and TigerDirect, the Radeon HD 4870 can be found for a cheaper price than the Radeon HD 5770, even though the Radeon HD 4870 performs at the same level as or sometimes even outperforms the Radeon HD 5770 (as seen here at Anandtech and here at Tom’s Hardware). The caveat is that the Radeon HD 4870 consumes an insane amount of power compared to the Radeon HD 5770, which depending on your usage habits, may or may not make the 5770 cost-effective.

Another example of this phenomenon is Polk Audio speakers. A lot of electronics retailers have been selling Polk Audio speakers at steep discounts. Though most of them still don’t quite qualify as cheap, many of these speakers have been selling for half or less of their original prices. These prices are mainly due to new generations of Polk Audio speakers coming out and old ones being taken out of stock.

A couple of benchmark prices are always handy to have something to compare prices to. Most basic netbooks sell for around $250 to $300. Thus, when Fry’s was selling a netbook for about $200 over Black Friday, it was a decent deal, but hardly a blockbuster one.

For laptops, ones sporting Intel Core 2 Duo processors, which may be labeled simply as “Centrino” or “Centrino 2″ processors (Centrino and Centrino 2 refer to Intel’s entire mobel platform, not just the CPU although sometimes it is used to refer to the CPU), usually weigh in anywhere from $500 to $700 for lower end models (usually T5xxx, T6xxx, T7xxx, or sometimes P7xxx processors) to $700 or over for those with P8xxx, P9xxx, or T9xxx processors. Laptops with discrete graphics cards can usually be found for about $700 or more as well. Laptops with AMD processors tend to be cheaper (and tend to offer less performance and less battery life as well) usually hovering around $500 to a bit over $600.

Desktops and separate computer components tend to be a bit harder to pin down. In the case of desktops, there is an opportunity for a greater variety of components that can be put in the desktop, and personally adding components is a lot easier than on a laptop so determining estimates of benchmark prices is a bit hard, especially for low-end computers where proportionally more of the price comes from peripherals rather than one or two components within the computer (e.g. the CPU and graphics card or cards). For desktops, most computers over $1,000 should come with a Core i5 or Core i7 processor. Anything below that, down to about $700 to $800, should have either a Core 2 Quad or a Phenom II. Below that, Core 2 Duo, original Phenoms, and Athlon II’s are usually present. Below about $400 to $500, we begin to see Athlon X2, Sempron, Celeron, and Pentium Dual-Core processors.

Computer components’ prices are still in a fair amount of flux. AMD/ATI’s newest and most powerful 58xx and 5970 graphics cards have seen shortages which caused AMD to bump up their prices. This means prices north of $300 for the 5850, $400 for the 5870, and $600-$700 for the 5970. As the stocks of AMD’s 4xxx series start to run dry, what had been a downward trend in prices is seeing a slight hike as well. 4830’s are now over $100 and 4870’s are now around $140. On the nVidia side of things, the GTX 260 is going for about $200 or over now and the GTX 295 is going for about $500 or more.

Yet amid the inevitable flurry of holiday deals, the most important point to remember isn’t the prices themselves. Keep in mind that price shouldn’t determine why you buy something, but rather where you buy something. “A good deal” does not justify spending money on something you would never use anyway (the only real exception I can think of to this is reselling the item later), but rather allows you to choose the retailer from which to buy something which you already wanted or otherwise already had a need or use for.