13 ms·

Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components

Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.

dangus 5mo ago
I don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI. I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available. I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without. The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least). The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.
- amluto 5mo ago
  I am massively sick of gaming focused boards. I don’t want my board to be “tough” or “mil-spec” or be extra shiny or have fancy-proprietary-auto-overclock. I want a reliable board that complies with all the specs it claims to support. Low idle power consumption would be nice, too. This is obnoxiously difficult to shop for in the desktop/workstation space.
  - greycol 5mo ago
    The PCIe lanes are the worst. You have x16 slots that run x1, you need to check slots with m.2 to make sure an x8 doesn't become x4 if you insert storage. Wait if I plug something into the thunderbolt port my 10g network card runs at half speed? Obviously these are actual physical limitation from PCIe lane counts, but it makes it impossible to search. Just painfull.
    - chainingsolid 5mo ago
      My advice to anyone doing motherboard shopping is to read the manual off the manufacture's site before deciding. The pcie lane tradeoffs tend to be in the block diagram next to the contents page.
      - post_break 5mo ago
        This is exactly why my comment goes over the head of people who cry just get the basic boards. No, this is why the basic boards for $100 don't cut it. You now need to dive into the technical data and realize that the $100 board seems like a deal for a reason, and suddenly the $300+ category is your only option if you want to get a PC that doesn't run on fake specs.
        dangus 5mo ago
        I'm just struggling to figure out how many people actually need the PCIe lanes for anything more than GPUs and storage, though. Like, what are you actually connecting your desktop to? The only reason laptops depend on Thunderbolt is because they have limited internal expansion and need high performance external I/O. If you need more things than gaming boards offer then obviously you have very advanced needs and can go pay for a workstation board, something like an sTR5 socket Threadripper board.
    - _factor 5mo ago
      They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.
      - greycol 5mo ago
        Obviously market tiering is part of it and you can play tricks with north and south bridge and pcie switches (which adds cost), but a ryzen board that advertises a pcie 5.0 x16 gpu slot and 5.0 x4 m2 slot only has 4 lanes left to work with from the cpu (i.e the cpus only have 24 usable lanes). Which while you can play with generations to get more lanes it's effectively still 16gb/s. That needs to cover network, extra m2 slots, usbs, as well as the extra PCIe slots. I don't mind having to work within those physical limits but I do want to be able to search for boards that support N components. i.e 1x 4.0x8, 2x 3.0x8, 4x 5.0x4 . But the best you can search for is physical sizes of pcie slots and then dive into a spec sheet for each one, only to find that the 6 x16 slots only have 1.0x1 of bandwidth each.
  - dangus 5mo ago
    What you are asking for is a workstation motherboard, which does exist. Filter by the sTR5 socket for AMD Threadripper chips, for example. Unfortunately, as far as finding something cheaper than that, you're looking for a product that appeals to a very small to non-existent market demographic. Most of the buyers who want workstation boards (companies) do not want a computer that requires assembly. The demographic that builds their own PC is almost exclusively doing so to play games. Everyone else who wants to use a computer wants a portable laptop. The good news is that all the complaints you have about gaming boards are mostly cosmetic. There's nothing unreliable about gaming boards. They all support the specs they claim to support. You don't have to use any overclocking features (I don't). They are off by default. If you want low idle power consumption, what you actually want is a system that has soldered RAM (LPDDR) which essentially goes against the other parameters of what you asked for. You don't want a module desktop PC at all if that's your parameter. What you really want is a mini PC or a Mac mini. You're asking for a workstation board with low idle power consumption, but nobody who wants that is optimizing for low idle power consumption. The best system for you is probably an HP, Dell, or Lenovo workstation PC. The good news for you is that these are all over eBay as corporations tend to sell them in bulk when they're done with them in just a few short years. They're reliable, quiet, and have low idle power consumption. Or, you can go with the big workstations that support ECC RAM.
- kasabali 5mo ago
  $180 for a basic motherboard is damn expensive though.
  - dangus 5mo ago
    It's really not. It's time to accept that inflation has happened and that we aren't going back to the past. We can talk all day long about how my mom waited tables for $2/hour and her first car cost $5,000 brand new, it's not relevant anymore.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo ago
My parents bought a mid-tier PC for $3,000 (in 1995 dollars) and there was still a thriving PC industry at those prices! While things are getting more expensive now (and that sucks) we have had it really good for a long time.
- torben-friis 5mo ago
  How much money was left to spend on hobbies considering the cost of education and real estate at the time?
  - anakaine 5mo ago
    Similar boat here, and more than enough for hobbies. The difference between income and housing cost was significantly less.
  - cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
    you mean you don’t prioritise helping your landlord buy their newest mcmansion? i’m just happy to have a roof over my head and continue to pay ever increasing rent!
- expedition32 5mo ago
  PC gaming in the 90s was insane technology moved so fast that your top of the line build deprecated in 3 years.
cryo32 5mo ago
Buying whole 2020 era PCs here for around $200 mark. As long as you don't need crazy CPU or GPU grunt, which is most people, they are almost indistinguishable from a new one. Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP. Probably same or better on Linux.
- trashface 5mo ago
  Windows 10 LTSC isn't a realistic option for most people.
  - esperent 5mo ago
    You can install windows 11 on an i5 9500 though and it'll run fine if you clean it up a bit.
  - Melatonic 5mo ago
    Why not ? There's even Win 11 LTSC now
- toasty228 5mo ago
  Upgrade my cpu the other day, got a ryzen 5 5600 for ~$100 new, can't complain. Still on my rtx 2060, can't complain either. As long as you don't fall for the 120hz and 4k memes you can easily get by with 2020 hardware indeed.
  - jay_kyburz 5mo ago
    I plugged a 60hz monitor in at work and discovered I can't ever go back. I need 32" 4k 120hz at least now.
  - zahlman 5mo ago
    I am "easily getting by" with 2014 hardware.
- zahlman 5mo ago
  > Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP I don't remember Win10 being particularly lean (although I'm sure 11 is worse). And the M4 is definitely a much more powerful CPU. Can you not run Firefox and uBO on that? Or have they really weighed things down that much with the OS somehow? > Probably same or better on Linux. Even with the Cinnamon desktop environment I can vouch it uses considerably less RAM for just the desktop (ordinary applications are probably about the same) and offers much faster filesystem access by default. I'm sure this is at least partly due to not being weighed down by built-in anti-malware (that would do basically nothing for people who are comfortable using Linux in the first place).
Aurornis 5mo ago
> Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+ Entry level motherboards are still $100. $300+ is a very high end motherboard. The existence of very high end products is confusing because it can give the impression that you have to buy a $300 motherboard because it exists. If you compare features side by side you're rarely missing anything important for the entry level motherboards. Some people really want the best of the best and feel the need to buy motherboards with Thunderbolt 4 and other future-proofing measures just in case they might need them, but it's premium and luxury territory.
- reactordev 5mo ago
  If you’re dropping that kind of cash, you definitely want to future proof it and not go with the budget lastgen motherboards.
  - Aurornis 5mo ago
    Future proofing is an expensive way to pay for features you don't need and will probably never use. It's smarter to buy a cheap motherboard that meets your needs now. If in the future you find the need for USB4 or some other feature, upgrade the motherboard. More often than not, builders will try to future proof for eventualities that don't arrive before it's time to upgrade to the next CPU socket anyway. There are a lot of people with expensive, outdated "futureproofed" builds who would have been better off saving the money on the original purchase so they could upgrade sooner instead.
    - ryukoposting 5mo ago
      This. In 2017 I bought the cheapest AM4 motherboard with a USB-C port (a Gigabyte X370 Aorus Word Salad). I'm still using it because BIOS updates gave it Zen 3 support. Wanna guess how many times I've used that USB-C port? Maybe once or twice in the 9 years I've owned it. Never needed it. I also couldn't tell you what X370 is getting me that B350 wouldn't have gotten me.
    - the__alchemist 5mo ago
dessimus 5mo ago
I mean, if you think about all the motherboard does, and how many layers the PCB has to support all the features such that for a vast majority of users, the only things you need besides the motherboard is a CPU, some RAM, storage (either in M.2 or SATA) and maybe a dGPU, it's wild that it is often the cheapest item in the PC.
- chainingsolid 5mo ago
  Well to be fair processors, ram and modern storage are lithography required to make parts. Not sure how much lithography the chipset requires.
laughing_man 5mo ago
I just priced out a new motherboard for $130.

Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.

dangus 5mo ago

I don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI. I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available. I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without. The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least). The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.

amluto 5mo ago
I am massively sick of gaming focused boards. I don’t want my board to be “tough” or “mil-spec” or be extra shiny or have fancy-proprietary-auto-overclock. I want a reliable board that complies with all the specs it claims to support. Low idle power consumption would be nice, too. This is obnoxiously difficult to shop for in the desktop/workstation space.
- greycol 5mo ago
  The PCIe lanes are the worst. You have x16 slots that run x1, you need to check slots with m.2 to make sure an x8 doesn't become x4 if you insert storage. Wait if I plug something into the thunderbolt port my 10g network card runs at half speed? Obviously these are actual physical limitation from PCIe lane counts, but it makes it impossible to search. Just painfull.
  - chainingsolid 5mo ago
    My advice to anyone doing motherboard shopping is to read the manual off the manufacture's site before deciding. The pcie lane tradeoffs tend to be in the block diagram next to the contents page.
    - post_break 5mo ago
      This is exactly why my comment goes over the head of people who cry just get the basic boards. No, this is why the basic boards for $100 don't cut it. You now need to dive into the technical data and realize that the $100 board seems like a deal for a reason, and suddenly the $300+ category is your only option if you want to get a PC that doesn't run on fake specs.
      - dangus 5mo ago
        I'm just struggling to figure out how many people actually need the PCIe lanes for anything more than GPUs and storage, though. Like, what are you actually connecting your desktop to? The only reason laptops depend on Thunderbolt is because they have limited internal expansion and need high performance external I/O. If you need more things than gaming boards offer then obviously you have very advanced needs and can go pay for a workstation board, something like an sTR5 socket Threadripper board.
  - _factor 5mo ago
    They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.
    - greycol 5mo ago
      Obviously market tiering is part of it and you can play tricks with north and south bridge and pcie switches (which adds cost), but a ryzen board that advertises a pcie 5.0 x16 gpu slot and 5.0 x4 m2 slot only has 4 lanes left to work with from the cpu (i.e the cpus only have 24 usable lanes). Which while you can play with generations to get more lanes it's effectively still 16gb/s. That needs to cover network, extra m2 slots, usbs, as well as the extra PCIe slots. I don't mind having to work within those physical limits but I do want to be able to search for boards that support N components. i.e 1x 4.0x8, 2x 3.0x8, 4x 5.0x4 . But the best you can search for is physical sizes of pcie slots and then dive into a spec sheet for each one, only to find that the 6 x16 slots only have 1.0x1 of bandwidth each.
- dangus 5mo ago
  What you are asking for is a workstation motherboard, which does exist. Filter by the sTR5 socket for AMD Threadripper chips, for example. Unfortunately, as far as finding something cheaper than that, you're looking for a product that appeals to a very small to non-existent market demographic. Most of the buyers who want workstation boards (companies) do not want a computer that requires assembly. The demographic that builds their own PC is almost exclusively doing so to play games. Everyone else who wants to use a computer wants a portable laptop. The good news is that all the complaints you have about gaming boards are mostly cosmetic. There's nothing unreliable about gaming boards. They all support the specs they claim to support. You don't have to use any overclocking features (I don't). They are off by default. If you want low idle power consumption, what you actually want is a system that has soldered RAM (LPDDR) which essentially goes against the other parameters of what you asked for. You don't want a module desktop PC at all if that's your parameter. What you really want is a mini PC or a Mac mini. You're asking for a workstation board with low idle power consumption, but nobody who wants that is optimizing for low idle power consumption. The best system for you is probably an HP, Dell, or Lenovo workstation PC. The good news for you is that these are all over eBay as corporations tend to sell them in bulk when they're done with them in just a few short years. They're reliable, quiet, and have low idle power consumption. Or, you can go with the big workstations that support ECC RAM.
kasabali 5mo ago
$180 for a basic motherboard is damn expensive though.
- dangus 5mo ago
  It's really not. It's time to accept that inflation has happened and that we aren't going back to the past. We can talk all day long about how my mom waited tables for $2/hour and her first car cost $5,000 brand new, it's not relevant anymore.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo ago

My parents bought a mid-tier PC for $3,000 (in 1995 dollars) and there was still a thriving PC industry at those prices! While things are getting more expensive now (and that sucks) we have had it really good for a long time.

torben-friis 5mo ago
How much money was left to spend on hobbies considering the cost of education and real estate at the time?
- anakaine 5mo ago
  Similar boat here, and more than enough for hobbies. The difference between income and housing cost was significantly less.
- cybercatgurrl 5mo ago
  you mean you don’t prioritise helping your landlord buy their newest mcmansion? i’m just happy to have a roof over my head and continue to pay ever increasing rent!
expedition32 5mo ago
PC gaming in the 90s was insane technology moved so fast that your top of the line build deprecated in 3 years.

cryo32 5mo ago

Buying whole 2020 era PCs here for around $200 mark. As long as you don't need crazy CPU or GPU grunt, which is most people, they are almost indistinguishable from a new one. Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP. Probably same or better on Linux.

trashface 5mo ago
Windows 10 LTSC isn't a realistic option for most people.
- esperent 5mo ago
  You can install windows 11 on an i5 9500 though and it'll run fine if you clean it up a bit.
- Melatonic 5mo ago
  Why not ? There's even Win 11 LTSC now
toasty228 5mo ago
Upgrade my cpu the other day, got a ryzen 5 5600 for ~$100 new, can't complain. Still on my rtx 2060, can't complain either. As long as you don't fall for the 120hz and 4k memes you can easily get by with 2020 hardware indeed.
- jay_kyburz 5mo ago
  I plugged a 60hz monitor in at work and discovered I can't ever go back. I need 32" 4k 120hz at least now.
- zahlman 5mo ago
  I am "easily getting by" with 2014 hardware.
zahlman 5mo ago
> Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP I don't remember Win10 being particularly lean (although I'm sure 11 is worse). And the M4 is definitely a much more powerful CPU. Can you not run Firefox and uBO on that? Or have they really weighed things down that much with the OS somehow? > Probably same or better on Linux. Even with the Cinnamon desktop environment I can vouch it uses considerably less RAM for just the desktop (ordinary applications are probably about the same) and offers much faster filesystem access by default. I'm sure this is at least partly due to not being weighed down by built-in anti-malware (that would do basically nothing for people who are comfortable using Linux in the first place).

Aurornis 5mo ago

> Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+ Entry level motherboards are still $100. $300+ is a very high end motherboard. The existence of very high end products is confusing because it can give the impression that you have to buy a $300 motherboard because it exists. If you compare features side by side you're rarely missing anything important for the entry level motherboards. Some people really want the best of the best and feel the need to buy motherboards with Thunderbolt 4 and other future-proofing measures just in case they might need them, but it's premium and luxury territory.

reactordev 5mo ago
If you’re dropping that kind of cash, you definitely want to future proof it and not go with the budget lastgen motherboards.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  Future proofing is an expensive way to pay for features you don't need and will probably never use. It's smarter to buy a cheap motherboard that meets your needs now. If in the future you find the need for USB4 or some other feature, upgrade the motherboard. More often than not, builders will try to future proof for eventualities that don't arrive before it's time to upgrade to the next CPU socket anyway. There are a lot of people with expensive, outdated "futureproofed" builds who would have been better off saving the money on the original purchase so they could upgrade sooner instead.
  - ryukoposting 5mo ago
    This. In 2017 I bought the cheapest AM4 motherboard with a USB-C port (a Gigabyte X370 Aorus Word Salad). I'm still using it because BIOS updates gave it Zen 3 support. Wanna guess how many times I've used that USB-C port? Maybe once or twice in the 9 years I've owned it. Never needed it. I also couldn't tell you what X370 is getting me that B350 wouldn't have gotten me.
  - the__alchemist 5mo ago

dessimus 5mo ago

I mean, if you think about all the motherboard does, and how many layers the PCB has to support all the features such that for a vast majority of users, the only things you need besides the motherboard is a CPU, some RAM, storage (either in M.2 or SATA) and maybe a dGPU, it's wild that it is often the cheapest item in the PC.

chainingsolid 5mo ago
Well to be fair processors, ram and modern storage are lithography required to make parts. Not sure how much lithography the chipset requires.

laughing_man 5mo ago

I just priced out a new motherboard for $130.