Thing is I take your comment and look at middle intel boards at £500 and highend at £750-£1100 and wonder why those boards are so ridiculous priced as well. In fact at the higher end, in general with like for like spec, I am seeing AM5 boards cheaper than their Intel boards.
If you look at the motherboards most normal people actually buy,the AM5 motherboards with PCI-E 5.0 are ridiculously priced. Very few people I know care about £300+ motherboards,but they do care about stuff between £150~£250.
It gets even worse when you look at the fact A620 is starting at £120,which is twice that of the A520 with no overclocking and last generation connectivity. B550 motherboards started at £100 onwards. It can't be even the cost of DDR5 implementations,because Intel has the same considerations and their motherboards need better VRMs unlike AMD. It can't be even the change to an LGA socket either.
A couple of points worth noting. First, AMD don’t make or sell motherboards that I know of and component costs have massively increased over the last 12 months.
The lower demand for retail parts after the covid driven boom and unprecedented slump in Intel based product sales probably isn’t helping motherboard prices either.
It affects Intel more as their motherboards need better VRMs in the first place due to higher power draw. The reality is AMD split B650 into PCI-E 4.0 B650 and PCI-E 5.0 B650E. B550 wasn't split the same way.
AM5 boards absolutely are more expensive, and i don't know why, its something i might look in to.
What ever it is this is a choice by board vendors.
There was a time when equivalent AM3 and 300 series AM4 boards were cheaper than Intel, but they were also of a lower quality.
Intel B660 Gaming X AX: £190
AMD B650 Gaming X AX: £240
It is.You already saw the last generation,the RX6600/RX6600XT/RTX3050 at upto £350 had PCI-E 8X connections. Nvidia and AMD are slowly pushing up lower end dGPUs to higher price points. The RTX4060 uses the same class of dGPU that was in the RTX3050,etc and only has 8GB of VRAM.
That means as time progresses the RTX5060/RX8600XT will only have PCI-E 8X connections,and limited VRAM. That means more issues,because they will cache into system RAM. Many here have no clue about this because they only buy expensive motherboards and expensive graphics cards,and upgrade quickly.
I had a quick look at some retailers and decided to just look at ASRock as an example.
These 2 B760 motherboards are £160~£170 from loads of retailers:
Supports 14th, 13th & 12th Gen Intel Core™ Processors (LGA1700); 12+1+1 Power Phase, Dr.MOS for VCore+GT; 4 x DDR5 DIMMs, Supports Dual Channel, up to 7200+ (OC); 1 PCIe 5.0 x16, 1 PCIe 4.0 x1; Graphics Output Options: HDMI, DisplayPort, eDP; Realtek ALC897 7.1 CH HD Audio Codec, Nahimic Audio...
www.asrock.com
This Z790 motherboard is £200:
DDR5 and PCI-E 5.0 main graphics slot. Two have WIFI.
Now look at the B650 equivalents from the same company:
The first one costs more than the B760 motherboards and the second costs more than the Z790 equivalent. None of them have PCI-E 5.0 graphics card slots.
Here is the B650E version,with PCI-E:
Over £250. That is just looking at one company. If you look at lot of manufacturers,there are plenty of DDR4/DDR5 motherboards with PCI-E 5.0 graphics card slots under £200 on the Intel side!
It's even worse with mini-ITX motherboards,as I use SFF systems,and so do quite a few of my friends. t
The cheapest AM5 mini-ITX motherboard is £250(MSI):
Order MSI MPG B650I Edge WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 Mini ITX Motherboard now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk
Totally PCI-E 4.0 for everything. The cheapest motherboard with PCI-E 5.0 graphics slot is £315(ASUS):
Order Asus ROG Strix B650E-I Gaming WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 Mini ITX Motherboard now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk
Plus,the need for overbuilt VRMs is less needed for a SFF PC,because you would rather run the CPU in its efficiency sweetspot anyway.
The cheapest B760 DDR5 mini-ITX with a PCI-E 5.0 slot is £230(ASUS):
Order Asus ROG Strix B760-I Gaming WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ITX Motherboard now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk
£85 difference for both Asus ROG Strix motherboards based on midrange chipsets? There is also an ASRock Z790 mini-ITX motherboard for around the same price.
The cheapest DDR4 one is £190,and it has PCI-E 5.0(MSI):
MPG series motherboards offer silver white color scheme for compact PC build, tuned for better performance by direct 8 phases VRM power, DDR4 memory with Memory Boost, Lightning Gen5 solution, Premium Thermal Solution, Wi-Fi 6E, 2.5G LAN, USB 3.2 Gen 2
www.msi.com
Both are MSI Edge motherboards and the AMD ones removes all PCI-E 5.0! The Intel motherboards need beefier VRMs too.
Probably not, haven't looked. You were 5alking about cheap motherboards though, there are B760M boards for around £130 on the Intel 1700 side but nothing at that level on the AMD AM5 side. Don't they usually release something like a A6xx chipset for AMD board that deal with the cheap end?
Not seeing anyone make those boards at the minute (although I've not looked hard). Although probably not relevant to this conversation as pairing a board like that with a 7950X3D does seem like a bit of a mismatch.
Exactly,as many here don't appear to shop around at different retailers and just go for £300+ motherboards.
It makes the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X look expensive in comparison,ie,the motherboard costs as much or more than the CPU.
People were repeatedly attacking Intel years ago,for doing this. Now the table has turned it's suddenly not the fault of AMD,splitting the B650 into literally a PCI-E 4.0 B650 and a PCI-E 5.0 B650E?! The amount of flip-flopping is amusing.
Remember people defended Zen3 price increases(and I said wait and see how much Zen4 will cost) and then people defended Zen4 pricing at launch. AMD quickly dropped prices,and introduced the non-X and X3D parts very quickly for a reason,ie,sales are not great.
What's even worse is I don't even think the Intel motherboards are that well priced either,but seriously spending £200 on a motherboard to get no PCI-E 5.0 at all??
That was X570 motherboard pricing,where you the latest PCI-E version. Now you get basically low tier stuff with old generation speeds.
I don't see why AM5 boards should be more expensive, look for yourselves, they are almost right across the range.....
AMD needs to be knocking heads together.
Well for me and my mates,we decided to skip Zen4 currently and wait for Zen5. The motherboard prices and feature separation are one of the main reasons,and the whole B650/B650E has put me off,especially as there is zero reason to have this as the chipset is the same Promontory 21. The pair of Promontory 21 chips cost less than the repurposed I/O die used in X570 motherboards. Yet,you could get X570 motherboards for £200. I hope the B750 motherboards are all PCI-E 5.0!
They must realise there are 1000's of us waiting to upgrade once the prices drop a bit, just get on with it already, i want new shinies.
They are probably thinking like Nvidia - less sales but at much bigger margins will even it all out. I think some of these companies need a few more reduced sales. It's not sunk into their heads,that the pandemic and mining booms during 2020/2021/2022 were a one off event,not something that they can continue every year for the next five years.
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