Motherboards are becoming so expensive! I've bought an Asus MB Deluxe for my Q9550 for a little more than 200€ and my current board, ROG Strix 270F gaming, cost me 190€. Now a mid range board is going to cost more than 300€!?

My last Intel mboard was the Asus Hero X Z370 with MSRP of $259. Now the new Hero costs 608 euros, terrible 😱

mig_07:

No doubt they're getting more expensive (on the enthusiast end) but the technology is incomparable. You're getting more for your money in the mid-range today than you would've in 2008. The quality of components is built to a different standard today. On-board audio quality from a decade ago was notoriously bad, so you were basically forced to purchase a good soundcard if you wanted a positional audio advantage in shooters. That's not necessary today.

You make some valid points but my Z270 board already has a very decent onboard audio solution and the build quality is very good so even if the newer boards are better in some aspects, i find hard to believe they are so much better to justify the price difference. An easy example, my ROG Strix Z270 F Gaming board cost me 190E a few years ago, now the ROG Strix Z690 F Gaming costs 486€!!! The Z690 has WI FI and better tech alongside DDR5 but i can´t see how those improvements are worth almost 400€ over my board...

if people expected pcie 3.0 prices, nope...X570/TRX40 with pcie 4.0 were already more expensive because they were new tech and more advanced they made their money back on copy/pasted pcie 3.0 designs a long time ago, now we're paying for pcie 4.0 5.0 development heh edit : oh yeah forgot ddr5 too $$$ that said we don't know all the models yet some like MSI kept their best ones for later but in a local shop that already has a few Z690 listed when sorting by most expensive price it's all asus on top they seem to be scalping people because of the brand I quickly checked and for my use (lots of usb peripherals M.2 a 10gb nic and a soundcard) the Z690 Taichi seems the best, most asus seem trash, really bad pcie placements, m.2 share bandwith rear I/O full of ports 0,1% of people use etc.. all the garbage that made me leave Intel after Z390 (leak gavce it for 860$ ouch...it's not worth that no way in hell that's the price of my feature perfect msi TRX40 creator)

H83:

Motherboards are becoming so expensive! I've bought an Asus MB Deluxe for my Q9550 for a little more than 200€ and my current board, ROG Strix 270F gaming, cost me 190€. Now a mid range board is going to cost more than 300€!?

Looking at the mid rangew Strix mid range in the table above the cheapest DDR5 ATX board is 480+ EUR. Add in the CPU AND 32GB of DDR5 and it will be well north of 1000 EUR.

The top mobo costs 2300$ ? WTF is wrong with Asus

kx11:

The top mobo costs 2300$ ? WTF is wrong with Asus

found reading techpowerup that it does have a new feature no one else has, the waterblock also contacts the 3 M.2s so it's a unique product right now cools cpu,vrm,pch,m2 which makes interesting but 2035 interesting ? oh wait no it just jump to 2149CHF in one day 😕 aka 2346$ 2030€ the cooling of the PCH is something I would like, it's the only thing left in my current computer that ever gets to 60+°C (other than the cpu I mean)

H83:

Motherboards are becoming so expensive! I've bought an Asus MB Deluxe for my Q9550 for a little more than 200€ and my current board, ROG Strix 270F gaming, cost me 190€. Now a mid range board is going to cost more than 300€!?

Not so sure about the mid range but the Formula Maximus board is around £50 more than I paid for my Formula Maximus 9 over 5 years ago.

mig_07:

£50 doesn't seem bad but pricing varies a lot by region. Brazil has some of the worst taxes for hardware, and just electronics in general. People are in for a shocker this holiday season. ASUS isn't holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy it. At that price it's about flexing and aesthetics honestly, lmao...

Of course I did a quick and dirty calculation on Euro to Pound to come out at about £600 I am certain that once it actually gets here and a nice mark up has been applied it will end up easily £100 to £150 over what I paid previously. Not that matters I opted to go for performance per pound this time round and ended up with a £110 MSI board, then again I bought that before the world went to total sh*t as well.