What happened to mainstream desktop motherboards?

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alex_stief

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May 31, 2016
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"Back in my days" you could usually get a perfectly functional motherboard for mainstream desktop platforms for 100€. Spend 150€ if you want something a bit nicer.
Going back only 5 years, the ASRock Z390 Pro4 launched late 2018 at around 140€, and quickly dropped to 120€. Of course it can be argued that this was not a particularly fancy board, but it was perfectly functional, with the top-tier chipset for Intel desktop at the time. There were plenty of options in the 100-150€ range, with the Zxxx chipset.

Fast forward to yesterday, when my jaw dropped looking for motherboards for X670 and Z790.
The price floor is now at 300€. A tad less for DDR4 on Z790. With the top end now at a whopping 1700€.

Yeahyeah, inflation, global pandemic and chip shortage... but tripling the price floor in a span of 5 years?
 

BoredSysadmin

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Mar 2, 2019
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Mobo complexity increases. PCIe 5.0 alone is probably responsible for at least 1/2 of the increase. But Yeah, The trend in price increases of mobos didn't start recently but has been ongoing for 10 years.
 

alex_stief

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May 31, 2016
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Complexity of PC components is increasing all the time. And yet we don't have CPUs that cost trillions of dollars, just because complexity increased steadily since the first chips were commercially available.
I'm not convinced that another iteration of PCIe is a valid explanation for this kind of price hike. And if it really is, boy what a waste of resources for consumer boards.
 

BoredSysadmin

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Mar 2, 2019
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Complexity of PC components is increasing all the time. And yet we don't have CPUs that cost trillions of dollars, just because complexity increased steadily since the first chips were commercially available.
I'm not convinced that another iteration of PCIe is a valid explanation for this kind of price hike. And if it really is, boy what a waste of resources for consumer boards.
I still rock PCIe v2 board circa 2011 with GTX1070ti PCIe v3 video card. Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out much performance I'm missing out on due to having a 1/2 slower PCIe. Answer - not much at all. The difference is in single digits percentages. PCIe v4 was severely needed in servers, and Intel was WAY behind. They are over-compensating by bringing PCIe5 too early, especially on consumer boards.
 
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BoredSysadmin

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the AM5 chipset is expensive. Don't we've decent Intel Z690 offerings for $150 & DDR4 support?
The X58 boards were insanely expensive when they came out.
Even though the article does say, " These boards are very high-end ", I see your point.
In addition, AMD said that budget chipsets - B650 and B650E should be available shortly. Source:
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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They are over-compensating by bringing PCIe5 too early
I agree and disagree with this at the same time :D
As a standard I think it's not too new: Pcie 4.0 was finalized in 2016 and ratified in 2017. Pcie 5.0 feels rushed (at least to me) because for a long time there were no devices or cpus that supported pcie 4.0.
If I remember it correctly mellanox had a network card for ibms power cpus at the end of 2016 but then there was nothing new for like two and a half years when zen2 arrived mid 2019.
 
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BoredSysadmin

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I agree and disagree with this at the same time :D
As a standard I think it's not too new: Pcie 4.0 was finalized in 2016 and ratified in 2017. Pcie 5.0 feels rushed (at least to me) because for a long time there were no devices or cpus that supported pcie 4.0.
If I remember it correctly mellanox had a network card for ibms power cpus at the end of 2016 but then there was nothing new for like two and a half years when zen2 arrived mid 2019.
By "they", I've meant Intel specifically. Intel was way behind in bringing PCIe v4 support. The rest of the industry relied on AMD platforms to develop and sell their pcie4 products. IMHO They've rushed to deliver pci5. Now, the extra bandwidth alone may not be hugely needed on desktops yet, but I do look forward to seeing CXL 2.0 products and designs.
 

oneplane

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Jul 23, 2021
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Some kinds of complexity increases do significantly change the cost. It used to be that we didn't need matched-length pairs on PCB traces back when timings and frequencies were low. That means all sorts of flexibilities as to what components you use, how you lay them out and what kind of PCB will work. That suddenly got much more expensive when you needed to use larger or additional layers on your PCB to get exactly length-matched traces. But between that being a requirement and the "old way" was a decade+ gap when plenty of other upgrades were happening.

Some major jumps come to mind:

- Single layer to double layer
- DIP to SMD (mixed first, where they actually glued SMD components first and then did the solder bath)
- Signal layers, integrity layers
- Microstrip vs. normal trace (luckily for us, not happening as frequent as it could be)
- Metal purity impacting signal integrity so now we need more expensive materials
- Higher frequencies with smaller buffers/preambles mean big performance increases but also less tolerances in design errors and manufacture imprecision

Even something seemingly insignificant can do this and drive up the cost: VGA to DVI wasn't all that expensive at first, but when DVI started to surpass the frequencies required for VGA the cables needed to be of a better material with less room for error, which makes both the raw materials more expensive and the process to make this stuff more expensive. This happened with USB2 (which would generally work with the same tolerances as USB 1.1 and 1.0) and USB3 too, and then again with USB3.2 (or whatever they call it now) and USB-C. And again with HDMI 1 to HDMI 2 (and the steps in between) and with Displayport 1 to 1.2a and again to 1.4a.

The big price increase generally is a combination of:

- Stricter requirements on materials (more expensive to make, more expensive to buy because validation is now more complex)
- More steps in the manufacturing process (sometimes linearly, but sometimes exponentially, i.e. when you do something special with your PCB layers, you end up with 1 extra layer step causing N layers extra steps)
- Fewer people are actually capable of designing this
- Fewer people are capable of designing for production with enough sophistication
- Fewer factories can make the investment to actually setup production lines
- You generally can't use those newer processes with older designs unless you want to be reconfiguring your machines all day (which you don't), so now you have to also keep all the old lines, old workforce, old processes next to the new stuff... bleh

As for the introduction of new stuff, that is indeed a problem on its own, because you generally need to keep old and new alongside each other for a while, and also work out the kinks in your designs and processes so you can increase your yield and not trash 30% of the stuff coming out of the production process. But once something new has been adopted widely enough (i.e. PCIe 5) the demand for the old stuff goes down, the knowledge might have spread a bit (making knowledge workers more readily available), the processes might have been optimised and fixed up, so now price can come down a bit (after making fat profits of course) and yields can go up. Stuff like this generally happens during the 'pong' after the initial 'ping' when a new bump in a standard is released, just like it does with Intel.
 

nabsltd

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Jan 26, 2022
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Fast forward to yesterday, when my jaw dropped looking for motherboards for X670 and Z790.
The price floor is now at 300€.
Remember that the "Z" series chipsets for Intel are for "enthusiasts", so you should expect higher prices.

That said, I have no explanation for the AMD offering, because the best I can find in the US is $290 for an X670. But, you can get Z790 for less than $200, and a choice of a half-dozen for less than $250.

The true mainstream Intel chipsets for LGA1700 (H610, B660, H670, etc.) have dozens of choices below $125. Even the lower-end enthusiast Z690 has dozens of sub-$200 options.