My previous two mobos were :
Maximus Hero in 2014 for £165.
Maximus Hero in 2017 for £250.
So i go to look today and a Hero is an eye watering £460.
Ok i get it there is inflation and raising costs but this is just seems to be ridiculous.
Let me guess, for £165 these days you get a budget Mobo
You can get some B550 motherboards around £150~£180 right now that swing with the top-end, as long as you can do without a few bells and whistles. B550 obviously only really suitable if you only have 1 PCIE 4.0 NVMe drive so you can keep your GPU at 16x. But 3.0 PCIE NVMe drives are still fast and most people will still find it costly to buy the superfast 4.0 NVMe drives. Let alone have 2 or more of them.
I picked up a B550 Unify X for like £160 and in terms of VRM and memory overclocking, it's up there in amongst best in class. I think the VRM is actually the absolute best on the market or equal to. Funny thing is I had a X570F Gaming mobo that died, which is why it was replaced and it didn't even have WiFi/BT built in whereas the Unify X does.
Some of the X570 boards while good, are a bit overpriced. Aesthetics over function with some of them as well, like paying stupid RGB-tax.