Remember when you could purchase a high-end AMD motherboard for around $100? You have to look all the way back to the Barton glory days, when the Asus A7N8X Deluxe and Abit NF7-S v2 dominated the talk of bang-for-buck ratios. But that was years ago, and inorder to get a top-of-the-line motherboard today, you’re looking at spending north of $200, particularly if you’re invested with Intel. Regrettably it doesn’t appear like mobo prices are coming down anytime soon, and in fact they may be on an upward trend.
Citing a Chinese-language Economic Daily News report, DigiTimes says the big three have all raised their motherboard prices. The big 3, or course, are Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI. Reasons for the price hikes are because of rising labor costs and higher costs for parts like the all-important printed circuit board (PCB).
How much extra motherboards might cost isn’t yet known. According to the paper, MSI raised its board prices by around 5 – 10% at the beginning of March. Actually, this will probably only add a few bucks at retail, which you might justify by saying they are offset by still very cheap RAM pricing.
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